


The Dragon Coda

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Magic, Case Fic, Friendship, Gen, Magic Revealed, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-14 20:49:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14144280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Dragons aren't really what Hotch expected them to be. Spencer hoards ties instead of gold, wears a tiny sweater-vest with holes for his wings, claims to have read every book, and sneezes snowflakes when he's cold. He's also small enough to ride on Hotch's head, and does, despite the fact that Hotch is pretty sure that there has to be regulations against wearing a sentient being like a hat. Hotch also didn't expect this: the dragons are dying, all of them.And, if he doesn't help them in time, Spencer will be next.





	1. Intro

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Dragon Song](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14065035) by [Deejaymil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil). 



> Thank you to the ever-amazing, FestiveFerret, for the beta! She's a grammatical Queen.
> 
> This is the spiritual successor to A Dragon Song, and is longer, plottier, and sadder than that one. The plot will drastically diverse from that one in chapter two, and I do recommend re-reading chapter one even if you read A Dragon Song--the plot is set up in this first chapter in snippets of scenes and dialogue that were missing from the one-shot version.
> 
> Updates will be weekly, on Fridays (for me. Australia is in the future by some sixteen hours, so it will be Thursday for most of my audience).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _~ Meeting a dragon ~ The story behind the tie ~ Catching nightmares ~ Impressing a dragon ~ The dragon decides ~_

The dragon arrived exactly one and a half hours after lunch, to allow time for digestion, as he would later explain. Dragons, above all, were unfailingly polite, and Spencer was no different in that regard.

“Good afternoon,” said a voice as Hotch was busy filing budget requests for the coming quarter. “You were expecting me, I hope.” The voice, when Hotch looked up to find the owner of it, had come from the chair tucked neatly against the front of his desk. The door remained closed, as it had been all day, and there was no one in sight. Incorrectly, it appeared as though he was alone.

“Huh,” said Hotch and returned to the budgets.

“I’m down here,” it continued, somewhat accusingly.

When Hotch stood and peered down onto the chair, a dragon looked back up at him. It was a deep navy blue from the tip of its tail, which it wore draped over one forearm much like a bride with a long train on her dress, to the pointed end of its long snout. It was, in fact, the exact shade of blue as Hotch’s suit jacket, which hung neatly from the back of the chair the dragon was sitting upon and which made the dragon quite difficult to see. The only aspects that stood out on the slender creature were eyes that whirled a sedate grey with no noticeable pupils and its carefully knotted six-fold tie.

Hotch observed all these things in a very careful manner, taking note of each and every one. He then sat down, just as carefully, and reached for the phone to call his doctor to book an appointment and then possibly call Rossi to admit to him that he was seeing dragons.

“I am _real_ ,” said the dragon, definitely petulantly now, and turned a deeper shade of blue. “Look—I even made an appointment.” And, with a short, tinny whistle, a card appeared on Hotch’s desk, right underneath his still hovering hand. A card that, until this point, had been sitting at home on his desk after he’d found it half pushed through his mail slot. It was a very simple card—completely blank except for _‘An Appointment with A Dragon for After Lunch (allowing time for digestion). Please & Thank You’ _written across it in a startlingly neat hand.

“This is Jack’s,” said Hotch, who’d made a rather simple but ultimately rash assumption about it.

“No, it’s not.” The dragon was now a pale blue and looking rather depressed. “I knew this would happen. I even put a _stamp_ on—the book said I should.”

Hotch turned the card over. _‘A Stamp’_ was written on the other side, in the same hand.

“Huh,” he said again. “How did you get past security?”

“I asked,” the dragon replied. “It’s tremendously important that I speak with you, Agent Hotchner.” It was then that Hotch noticed the shouting, as though something alarming or very exciting had been noted several floors down and the news was slowly spreading upwards.

The door banged open, and Rossi barged in after it, bursting out with, “Hotch, there’s a—” He stopped, eyes bulging worryingly. Hotch leaned back in his chair, relieved of the need to phone his doctor as Rossi stared at his guest.

“A dragon,” Hotch said matter-of-factly. And, now that procedure and sanity had both been verified, he had a job to do. “Excuse me, Dave, but I believe it—he?” The dragon nodded, eyes whirling: “—has an appointment.” Rossi slowly backed out, blinking rapidly and closing the door gently behind him. “Now, you were saying, Mr.…?”

“Spencer,” said the dragon, turning back to his original shade of suit blue and puffing his chest up. “Dr. Spencer Reid.”

 

* * *

 

The dragon told his story.

“I need your help,” he said grimly, his colour changing and deepening, turning solemn and worried. “No one will listen to me. They’re determined to pretend that nothing is wrong—that we aren’t disappearing in unprecedented numbers.”

Hotch listened to the tale. The dragons, he was told, were fading. It had begun with the largest, the oldest. The strongest. Now, others were succumbing. Older dragons were vanishing, never to be seen again. Often in pairs, always without noting. No young were being created. No one knew why, and the dragons, for the most part and despite the danger, were unconcerned.

“It’s too swift,” Spencer said. He was fiddling with the very tip of his slim tail in his paws, as though fretful. “We don’t move fast, we never have. Dragons take their time to decide and time is something we don’t have—we need to know _now_ , before there’s no one left.”

“Why us?” asked Rossi. The team—the dragon had refused to speak to anyone else—were gathered silently around the conference table, all eyes on the strange creature perched in the centre. Outside, the entire Bureau was left wondering what was going on; Hotch sighed inwardly as he thought of the stack of FD forms he was going to need to fill out for ‘permission to consult with unofficial sentient being’. Probably FD-1000 through to 1200, knowing his luck. In triplicate.

“I think it has something to do with the magic,” said Spencer simply. “It’s leaking. Wherever it leaks, wherever I follow, I find your team cleaning up the damage the leaks do. You solve puzzles—you help people and save lives. Well, our lives need saving, and I’m asking you to help us, please. The others want to ignore it, but I don’t. My partner doesn’t. Most of us, the younger ones, we don’t—we feel it, when they vanish. It hurts.” He paused, his colour now a pallid white-blue and making him look ghoulish. Not just frightened: terrified.

“How do they vanish?” was JJ’s question as she tipped forward on her chair like she wanted to reach out to him.

“They sing,” said the dragon, “and then they’re gone.” With that, he curled small and covered his muzzle with his paws, so pale he was almost translucent, the tie around his neck stark against his softly scaled skin. Hotch looked to each of his team members, wondering what exactly they were going to do about this, and how they would go about investigating the disappearance of the dragons. He didn’t think there was any protocol that dealt with _magic_ , if such a thing really existed. It said something about his steadfast determination to simplify his complicated life that, when faced with a dragon, he still chose to believe in logic above whimsy.

“We’ll need to speak to any witnesses,” he said finally, falling back on well-learned procedure. “Other dragons.”

“They won’t speak to you,” the dragon replied, his voice muffled by paws. Grey eyes, now a dull blue, whirled as he peered out from between spread toes. “The last time we spoke to humans, someone was eaten.”

There was silence as they considered that.

“We can’t help you if your people won’t cooperate with us.” Hotch used the same voice he used on any reluctant witness, scaly or otherwise. “That’s if we take your case on at all. We have no proof of wrongdoing.”

“You have my word,” said the dragon, blinking. It was the first time any of them had seen him do that. “Why would I lie? I’m risking everything coming here. Unless I can prove that your people are those that my people would deign to speak to, I’ll be ostracised for being so rash.” He huffed grumpily, a small stream of smoke filtering from his nostrils to curl into the air above. “I _was_ rash. I only took two years to choose your team.”

“You’ve been watching us for _two years_?” Morgan exclaimed.

The dragon’s neck snaked around as he peered at him without turning his body. “Yes, of course. How else would I decide? I couldn’t speak to just _anyone_. I had to know that you all possessed certain qualities. Bravery, truthfulness, determination to do right.” He looked at Hotch, adding, “Imagination,” in what Hotch assumed he fancied to be a snide voice, Rossi’s mouth twitching.

It clicked.

“That tie…” Hotch said slowly, recognising it. “That’s _mine_.”

The dragon nodded. “I knotted it myself,” he said, puffing his chest out again.

“You’re…” Hotch studied the dragon, as he returned to his former shade of navy. “You’re imitating me?”

“I am taking upon the appearance expected for appointments,” the dragon replied proudly. “I studied it in order to make the best possible impression. Your people’s book on appointment making was very helpful, as was observing your daily routine.”

“Our book?” JJ sounded overwhelmed, looking at a point between Hotch and the dragon as though for some kind of proof she wasn’t hallucinating.

“Yes. ‘How to be a Professional’. It assured me a well-fitting suit is integral for professional males, of which Agent Hotchner appears to be a supreme example.” The dragon looked down at himself and tilted his head. “I needed to make the best impression, and I could think of nothing more well-fitting than my own skin. Was I successful? I hope I was, although I understand if you must all now deliberate over my request despite my professionalism. I do ask that you don’t take any longer than five years though…”

He looked terribly, plaintively hopeful.

Hotch looked at his team members again and, correctly this time, read every face aimed at him. They ranged from JJ’s ‘please’ to Rossi’s ‘don’t you dare make this thing sad’ to Morgan’s ‘why haven’t you said yes yet’ and, so, he sighed and made his own rash decision of the day. “No need for that,” he told the dragon, his wrist twinging from the stack of paperwork he could sense already landing on his desk. “We’ll help you.”

The dragon turned a glowing, happy yellow, startling them all. “Yes!” he cheered, hopping a bit on the spot. “Oh, Emily will be so pleased!” And, with that, he vanished with a pop, leaving behind nothing but the smell of smoke and the tie, crumpling gently to the table.

“Huh,” said Rossi.

Hotch felt very much the same way.

 

* * *

 

‘Spencer’ reappeared a month later, quite suddenly. Hotch only knew that he was there because the roomful of police officers he was delivering a profile to all went very quiet, eyes widening almost in unison. Hotch followed the eyes, finding the dragon sitting on top of the whiteboard with their case pinned to it, perched like a bird with his head craned upside-down to study what was displayed there.

“Don’t mind me,” said Spencer, rotating his head right way up and observing Hotch through one eye. “Please continue.”

“Ah,” said Hotch, reorienting himself before launching back into the profile without missing another beat, despite the room’s fractured attention. When it was over, he thanked them, turned to walk back into the office they were working from, and determinedly didn’t flinch as the dragon leapt from the whiteboard to his head and settled down comfortably with his tail wrapped around his neck. Like that, they walked into the office, finding more eyes to stare at them.

“There’s a dragon on your head,” said Rossi attentively.

Spencer, in response, puffed what Hotch fancied to be a happy plume of smoke from his nose, which was hovering very close to Hotch’s eye. “See,” he said, kneading his little paws into Hotch’s scalp as Hotch refused to wince at the needle-y claws nipping at him, “I told them I’d picked well. You’re all so _clever_.”

Rossi raised an eyebrow, but Hotch was oddly certain that the dragon was sincere.

“We’re in the middle of a case,” Hotch warned Spencer, lifting him onto the table and watching him scamper over to JJ, studying the casefiles she was paging through. “We can’t help you right now.”

“That’s okay,” Spencer replied, blinking slowly. “The others aren’t convinced that you’re right yet. They’ve instructed me to remain silent until we can be sure.”

“Sure of what?” asked Morgan.

“Sure that you’re _right_ ,” said Spencer firmly, tapping an unsheathed claw on the casefile, overtop a picture of a desiccated femur. “This bone is mislabelled. It’s female, not male. Female femurs are wider—sexual dimorphism.”

Hotch glanced at the bone, making a mental note to check that—it changed their profile if it was true—and asked, “How are you going to be sure?”

Spencer’s eyes whirled grey again, before settling to a bright hazel as he circled once and curled up on the table. “I’ll watch,” he said cheerfully, “for as long as I have to.”

And, just like that, the BAU gained its very own dragon.

 

* * *

 

Dragons, as they quickly learned, might be very polite but that didn’t mean they were always easy to get along with. Spencer was startlingly intelligent, extremely awkward, and had no boundaries for his curiosity. Hotch requested access for their dragon to the FBI handbooks and manuals on every conceivable procedure, leaving Spencer alone with them for just a day and returning to find him able to recite them verbatim, once even correcting Rossi on a point Rossi himself had written. He rode about on Hotch’s shoulder or his head, extending his sinuous neck out as far as it would go to examine each person Hotch stopped to speak to, no matter how uncomfortable it made that person, and occasionally practising his ‘profiling’ on whoever the poor person was.

After an encounter with Strauss that was profoundly mortifying for them all, Hotch decided that perhaps Spencer would enjoy being let loose in Archives for a little while. Thirty-five access and non-disclosure forms later, he delivered his dragon to the gated room filled with shelves and shelves and shelves of past cases awaiting digitilisation and walked away, once again incorrect in his assumption that the dragon was dealt with.

He was wrong.

“I’m done,” said Spencer, appearing with a pop by Garcia’s head and almost startling her into dropping her coffee into Morgan’s lap. It was two days later. “That was _fascinating,_ thank you!”

“Huh,” said Hotch, and decided he really needed to stop being surprised by him.

It was discovered at Halloween that Spencer loved candy, which was unfortunate, as dragons didn’t appear to have any way of digesting food. An odd discovery, seeing as Spencer had a firm fascination with the digestive system that led to several awkward lunches where he would sneak under Hotch’s desk and tuck his head against his stomach, listening to whatever it was he could hear. Hotch never asked. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Instead, whatever Spencer ate—usually candy—was expelled as thick clouds of multi-coloured and scented smoke that he seemed completely unable to control, leaving trails of burnt sugar behind him as it settled.

After a disastrous day where JJ—who was unable to say no to the little dragon’s pleading gaze no matter how often Hotch politely reminded her that Spencer’s eyes were almost certainly bigger than his apparently non-existent stomach—gave him half of her tuna-fish lunch, a new form appeared on Hotch’s desk. This one was a requisition form for a new sign for the bullpen, and he approved it with a sigh. The sign appeared three days later: _Care & Feeding of the Dragon_, it read in big bold black letters, containing only one tip underlined twice and written in red: **_Don’t._**

On cases, Spencer rode proudly on Hotch’s shoulder, sometimes curling up on his head and, somehow, not really taking anything away from his stern countenance. It became apparent that Spencer had picked the singular person in existence who could still look imposing with a small tie-wearing dragon perched on his head like a hat. If Hotch tried to leave him behind, he’d simply curl up innocently wherever placed and then, usually at an incredibly inconvenient time, pop into existence back onto his established spot upon Hotch’s head. This included one notable time when his appearance had startled an unsub so much the man had opened fire, earning a dismissive whistle from Spencer. Hotch, who’d gone to throw himself down with his arms wrapped around the unprotected creature’s delicate frame, found that every gun in the room, fired bullets included, had vanished along with the whistle.

“I don’t like guns,” Spencer had said peevishly as Morgan had arrested the man, the dragon turning a grumpy green. From that moment on, he’d repeated the trick so often that the agents began to pull their sweaters down over their weapons before entering a room with him, in case he whistled and hid them. Hotch sometimes wondered where the guns went when he vanished them, but decided—probably wisely—not to ask.

On the other hand, interrogations became easier, with people usually so intimidated by the dragon puffing rings of irritating smoke at them that their guards were completely down. And, if they did try to lie around him, he called them on it every time.

“I don’t know who that is,” said the suspect on one particular day, wincing as Spencer’s eyes flashed red.

“Lie,” said the dragon.

“No, it’s not!”

More red. “Lie,” the dragon said, smugger this time, and yawned.

The man spluttered, handcuffs clinking on the table as he tried to pull away. “I-what-you—” he garbled, before screaming, “You’re a lie! You’re not even supposed to exist!”

They looked at Spencer.

“I don’t think you need me for that one,” he said, and went to sleep.

But no matter how much trouble the dragon caused, it was unanimous that his worth exceeded it. “The US Government is very interested in opening up lines of communication with the dragons,” Hotch was told over and over again, every time he was called to yet another ‘creation of a new bureaucratic form to deal with some unforeseen complication of having a dragon’ consultation. “Since they have chosen you, Agent Hotchner, we implore you to act with dignity and in a manner befitting the spokesperson of the human race.”

“I’m not entirely sure what he wants of us,” Hotch retorted, feeling a bit like a butterfly pinned up with all the dragons peering in at him, wherever they were. “What are we supposed to _do_?”

“Impress him,” he was told, and nothing else.

Winter brought snow, and Spencer becoming distracted every other minute to go out and chase it until he reappeared shivering and coughing snowflakes instead of smoke. Garcia, without hesitation, knitted him a tiny sweater-vest with holes for his wings, which he wore proudly from that day on. “Kindness,” he said happily, the day he was presented with it. “You’re all so kind.”

The following month, he stopped a suicide bomber and saved thirteen hostages without a single casualty. He was awarded agent status the very next week.

“I’m the very first Dragon-Doctor-Agent,” he informed Hotch as Hotch packed to go home that night, the dragon perched on Hotch’s desk with his new ID pinned to his sweater-vest where everyone could see it. “Isn’t that exciting!”

“How did you even get a doctorate?” Hotch asked, more thinking of home than he was his eccentric reptilian subordinate.

“My understanding is that they are awarded after a long period of study and demonstration of intelligence,” Spencer replied. Hotch looked at him, always wary—after the pool noodle incident—of any sentence Spencer began with ‘my understanding’. “I decided it would help with making you comfortable with me if I took on a human title of respect, so I did both.”

“What did you study?”

Spencer replied, “Libraries,” as though this didn’t need further explanation.

“Which library?” Hotch prompted, a little confused.

The dragon peered at him, as though he was the slow one here. “All of them,” he finally said. “I read very fast. Good night.” And, then, he vanished.

As they exited the BAU, Hotch asked Rossi after explaining the exchange, “Do you think he meant he read _every_ book in _every_ library?” because, surely not?

“When it comes to that dragon,” Rossi said wryly, “I try not to think too much at all.”

And life continued on, mostly unchanged by the discovery of dragons. If, sometimes, Spencer ignored everyone in favour of staring off wistfully into the distance with his colour a woeful teal, they never asked and he never told.

 

* * *

 

Nine months after the dragon arrived, Hotch heard him sing for the first time.

Spencer hadn’t shown up for a week, concern making it difficult for any of them to focus. They’d gone on a case, without their dragon, and returned four days later—still without their dragon.

“You will look for him, won’t you?” asked Garcia, all worried eyes and a downturned mouth.

“Of course,” Hotch said. How could he say anything else to that expression, despite his worry that Spencer had taken too long to decide on whether they were ‘right’ and whatever was hurting the dragons had caught up to him? When the others went home, he stayed behind and wondered where a dragon would go. And he wondered and wondered and wondered, until his wondering became drifting and the exhaustion of the past four days caught up to bring his head down to the desk. He dreamed of a song of no language, a rhythm that sung with his very heartbeat. It was wordless and intimate and, when he woke, his cheeks were wet. He was distantly aware that he’d dreamed of loss, of something less where there had been more.

Half-awake and shaken to his core, he followed that heartbeat down down down until he shivered himself conscious with his hand pressed to the gated door of Archives. It swung open. The room was silent. His ID was in his hand, the soft beep of the access scanner the only sound. There was nothing around but the narrow aisles, the dusty shelves, the fading boxes of broken lives.

And loss.

“What is that song?” he asked the silent air.

The air replied, in a voice like sorrow, “It has no name. It doesn’t need it. What good is a name for it? That would be worthless to the majority of our listeners.”

“I heard it,” Hotch said softly, walking towards that voice. Down one of those narrow aisles to where the dust was disturbed and one of those fading boxes was knocked askew, smoke drifting lazily out through the lopsided lid. “I was listening. Are you okay?” He wondered, for the first time, if Spencer had family of his own. Who he returned to when he vanished with a polite ‘good night’.

“Your species is outnumbered exponentially by beetles,” Spencer said, his voice a dull grumble. He sounded miserable, almost angry with it, and his colour was a sickly maroon when Hotch slid the lid from the box and peered into what was clearly a drafty, dusty nest. “If anything, we sing for the beetles. They don’t care to name things. Their business is _far_ too important to waste their time with naming things.”

“Did someone die?” asked Hotch. “Another dragon?”

“No.” Spencer curled tighter. Hotch couldn’t tell, not at this angle, but he fancied the dragon was a little smaller than usual.

Hotch looked around, at the harsh lights and the silent room. “Have you been sleeping here?” he tried again, sensing the dragon was reluctant to talk. “Isn’t it lonely?”

In response, Spencer made a sound—a high, clear note that trilled and then crashed, like glass shattering—and buried his nose under his paws. “A dragon _never_ sleeps alone,” he said miserably, his colour worsening. “And all I _am_ is alone—I can’t go home without proof that I’m correct, I can’t disappoint Emily like that, and you humans move so _fast_. You’re there, gone, there, gone, there—when do you ever have time to just think?”

“You’ve been sleeping in a box?” Hotch didn’t really know where to go with this.

“It’s a lovely box,” Spencer replied, always polite, even to boxes. “But…”

“Lonely.”

“Lonely,” he agreed.

Hotch looked around again, and he said, “Would you like to come home with me?” There was really nothing else he could say, his heart breaking a little at the sad dragon in the cardboard box.

And Spencer, flickering a hopeful yellow, replied, “Oh, yes _please_.”

 

* * *

 

“Can Spencer sleep with me?” Jack asked hopefully as Hotch helped him button his pyjama top.

“He’s not a pet,” Hotch answered. “He’s staying in the guest room.”

“Oh,” said Jack.

“Oh,” said Spencer, who had apparently been sitting on Jack’s bookshelf watching them. “Which room is that?”

“Third down the hall.” Hotch looked up as he spoke, finding no dragon peering down, Spencer having vanished off to poke around on his own. Jack wiggled in his arms, wanting to follow the dragon, but Hotch steered him to his bed. “Nope. You’ve had enough chattering at him tonight—bedtime for all of us.”

“Do dragons sleep?” Jack asked, bouncing and continuing to bounce as he leapt into his bed. “Do they snore? Do they dream? Could I be a dragon? Is Spencer going to have breakfast with us? Can we have pancakes—”

“Sleep.” Hotch tweaked the blankets over his head, smiling a little at the giggle that floated up from under them, and left the room. “Goodnight, Jack. I love you.”

“Night, Daddy. Love you more and more and more, to infinity-always.”

Spencer, when Hotch went looking, was sitting in the centre of the guest bed looking around the room with a bemused cast to his colour. Since his expression was exceedingly difficult to read—lacking lips or eyes that actually betrayed emotion—Hotch was finding that he was getting very good at assigning mood to colour. And it did look rather ridiculous, the tiny dragon sinking into the covers of the queen-sized bed, but what else could Hotch do?

“Well, goodnight,” Hotch said awkwardly. “You should be comfortable in here.”

Spencer looked around some more. “Oh, I’m sure I will,” he said, laying down and stretching as far as he could go and still barely covering a fraction of the bed, even with his wings spread wide. “This will do nicely. In here…” He trailed off, watching Hotch intently as the man went to walk out. “…Yes, in here…”

If Hotch was the type of person to fiddle, he’d have fiddled with his sleeve or worried his lip in that moment of awkward waiting.

“Good night, Agent Hotchner,” said Spencer finally. And, with that, he slithered up the covers and vanished underneath them, only visible as a long line of movement that settled and curled into a tight ball in the very centre of the bed. Hotch turned off the light and left the door ajar, retiring to his own bed with the distinct feeling that this arrangement wouldn’t last.

It didn’t.

He woke with the swiftness and clarity born of a lifetime of waking suddenly to Jack shaking him. “Dad,” he said, eyes huge on his shadowed face, “there’s monsters in my room.”

“We’ve talked about this,” Hotch replied, heart sinking. “There’s no such thing as monsters, Jack.” This was a lie, and they both knew it. Haley’s photo watched them both from the bedside cupboard, calling him on his bluff.

But Jack shook his head, mouth set stubbornly. “Yes, there is,” he said firmly. “Spencer’s eating them.”

He was right.

Hotch stared into his son’s room as the dragon dived about with wild abandon into puddles of shivering black that swirled around the bedroom floor, trying to avoid the dragon’s teeth and claws. When he dived, the puddles shattered into smaller fragments, smaller yet in his paws as he swallowed puffs of smoky black and spat smoke out in response.

“See,” said Jack smugly, hiding behind Hotch’s legs and peering around. “ _Monsters_.”

“Not monsters,” said Spencer, grabbing another puff of black and winging his way to them to drop it into Hotch’s hand. The puff was fluffy and blacker than black, with nothing within it except shadows and two singular glints of _alive._ “It’s a nightmare, a big one.”

Hotch, looking down into those glints, had the unsettling feeling that he was looking into the dark itself, and the dark was looking back. “How about we sleep in my room?” he said, putting everything he was looking at firmly into the ‘tomorrow’ basket. Spencer, in response, turned yellow and swallowed two puffs of the wiggling nightmare whole, biting down with relish. Hotch just backed out, taking his son with him, and went to bed to wait for the dragon to finish his meal.

That night, with Jack cuddled against one side and Spencer curled on the pillow above his head, Hotch dreamed. He dreamed of dragons littering the sky like midday stars made of every colour, and he dreamed of Spencer singing happily to an audience of the world, and he dreamed of Haley.

“That nightmare was too bitter for one person,” the dream Spencer told him between songs, his voice a whisper Hotch wouldn’t remember in the morning. “Shared nightmares are always the ones with the sharpest bite—but don’t worry. Nightmares are just dreams turned sour, and I can fix them.”

The nightmare which, when asleep, wasn’t puffy and indistinct at all but choking and overwhelmingly hungry, listened to the song and changed. Only a little at first, too big for one little dragon to consume alone, but other voices joined it, and Hotch listened.

_Help me?_ asked Spencer.

_Dragons never sing alone,_ said the other voices with every sound Hotch had ever imagined. _We help._

The nightmare faded, and vanished.

When Hotch woke the next day, the picture of Haley seemed kinder, less recriminatory. And he hadn’t had the dream he’d had every night since _that_ night—the one painted with Haley’s blood and Foyet’s laughter and Jack screaming.

In fact, he rather thought that he hadn’t dreamed at all.

 

* * *

 

The day came that Spencer decided. It took him almost exactly seven months, and it was finally because of JJ. She’d broken down on the flight home after a vicious case, out of sight of them, but they were aware. It was rough on them all. When she returned from the bathroom, reddened eyes and flushed cheeks betraying her, Spencer flew to her arm and perched with his eyes whirling gently. He whistled once, a long trill of sad happiness.

“Empathy,” he announced, wrapping his tail around and around and around her arm to steady himself as she tickled his chin. “I told them your team wasn’t changed by your cruel work. Yes, I think I’ve decided.”

“Decided what?” asked Rossi, paused over the chess game he’d been playing with Spencer before he’d flown to JJ.

Spencer looked at Hotch and said firmly, “It’s time I took you to my home.” Suddenly, he tucked his snout down, curling his mouth in just the kind of way that Hotch knew was his smile and turning a delicate pink, before adding, “It’s time you met _Emily_.”

Emily-the-other-dragon, Hotch decided, couldn’t possibly be as surprising as her partner.

He was wrong.


	2. Verse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _~ Another dragon ~ A bad host ~ At the Wellspring ~ A new nightmare ~ A worrying dawn ~_

Emily, Spencer told them, was the biggest, the blackest, the most _beautiful_ of all the dragons that had ever or would ever again live on this earth. The way he described her, they were quite certain that they were going to visit the Queen of all Dragons, resplendent with grace and absolute dignity. They were to be _awed_ by her presence, to be honoured by her even deigning to speak to them. The entire time he talked of her—the whole five-hour flight to Las Vegas—his body glowed a deep pink shot through with gleaming yellow flickers of happy _._

Hotch, recognising the gleeful rambling of someone who was utterly in love and blinded by that, wisely did nothing but agree.

“So, she’s going to be approximately the size of a Labrador?” Rossi muttered as they walked to the rental cars they were taking to the depths of a sandstone gorge outside of Vegas. Spencer was going to guide them from there to the home he shared with Emily, hidden by whatever strange magic that dragons seemed to possess.

“Maybe a Doberman,” Hotch agreed, watching their small dragon fly in giddy circles overtop of the car as airfield staff stared at him.

They were both wrong.

Spencer’s home was beautiful. It was also absolutely not what any of them had expected as they arrived, sweaty and panting after the sun-baked hike across bare sandstone painted in creams and pinks and reds. Instead of being flat, it was made of spires of rock intricately wound in with the outcropping yawning up to the sky behind it. All the hot colours of the surrounding sandstone wove throughout it, circling windows that shone so strangely to Hotch’s eyes that he was sure they weren’t made of glass as he understood it. The door that they walked towards seemed, all at once, made perfectly shaped for a small winged dragon with paws for hands and yet also sized comfortably for the bipedal humans walking behind him. The desert around them wasn’t silent, not even close, with insects humming and the heavy sound of overwhelming heat pressing down, but, as they approached the dragonly home, they could also hear water and a steady throbbing beat of something living around them, sounds that overwhelmed all else.

“Emily’s home!” said Spencer excitedly, standing so suddenly on Hotch’s shoulder that he had to put his wings out and wheel them in order to stop from falling off.

“How can you tell?” Hotch said, when he’d recovered from his awe at the house—because it _was_ a house, no matter how alien it seemed to his eyes—so suddenly appearing from the haze.

Around turned Spencer’s head to look at Hotch, eyes whirling gold with exhilaration. “Can’t you feel it?” he exclaimed. His claws were nipping Hotch’s shoulder through his thin shirt as his rear end wiggled as though he was orientating himself ready to leap into the air. “Listen!”

They listened. Below them and above them and around them, the desert sung: a steady _thump thump_ of something terrific in the biblical sense, inspiring both awe and terror in equal measures.

“What is that?” JJ asked, shifting her feet as though the sound was resonating through her boots.

“It’s Emily,” said Spencer matter-of-factly.

And Hotch clicked to what the sound was: they stood upon the stone listening to the fixed beat of a great heart. But that seemed insane, impossible. It must be something else. Once more, he sought safety in the arms of logic over the terrifying emptiness of the unknown.

But Spencer wasn’t waiting for them to recover from this world-shattering revelation; he had finally lost all semblance of self-control and leapt from Hotch’s shoulder to fly through the wavering doorway of the house, vanishing with an excited, “Emily!” as they hurried after him.

Hotch gasped as they went through the door. Inside the home, it was the desert personified. Heat swallowed them, as though they’d stepped into the smoky innards of summer itself, the same overwhelming, stomach-churning heat of an oncoming wildfire. So hot that he could barely think to appreciate how human the décor appeared, with the walls of the great hall they found themselves standing in polished so smooth that they seemed made of some jewel, with nooks and alcoves set into the stone walls lined with shelves overflowing with books and papers and neat piles of glossy magazines. The lower alcoves spilled outward with what appeared to be every gun Spencer had ever whistled away, leading to a larger pile set against the wall. The back wall of the room was a gleaming, accented black, sheer and curved gently towards the ceiling, so dark that the light streaming in through the many strange windows seemed to be swallowed by its depths.

The wall opened a single, yellow eye.

“Don’t ‘Emily’ me,” it said peevishly and moved. And moved. And continued moving, unfolding endlessly and then some more into the hulking shape of an enormous, pitch-black dragon, exactly what Hotch would picture if he’d been asked to imagine a ‘dragon’ before Spencer had rearranged his understanding of the word. “Where have you _been_?”

Spencer immediately turned a sorry shade of cream, shrinking down into himself on the polished floor with his wings tucked apologetically. “I got distracted,” he said guiltily. “But I also decided! Look, Emily, it’s them!”

The vast dragon turned slowly, so slowly, to stare at the team, who stood transfixed by that predatory gaze. Unlike Spencer’s eyes, this dragon had pupils, deep black and slitted like a cat’s. When she leaned closer with the guns under her paws creaking dangerously, the air trembled, massive jaws opening ever so slightly as a forked tongue flickered behind fangs that stood almost as long as one of Hotch’s forearms and almost as wide.

“Fascinating,” she said, blowing a desert wind over them as she spoke. Morgan whimpered. Rossi appeared to be having a heart attack of some kind; JJ simply seemed frozen. “Seven months, Spencer. Seven months since you’ve come home! Not even a note! Not even a whisper—you could have been _vanished,_ and I couldn’t even come looking for you! How could you?”

“Uh oh,” JJ whispered. Spencer, on the other hand, was sinking even smaller as the other dragon leaned in close and dwarfed him with her snout. But, even as they watched with their hearts in their throats, he stood on his hind legs and reached with his paws to pull himself up onto her muzzle, scrabbling a little until he was perched neatly between her ridged nostrils.

“I missed you too,” he said seriously and bumped his smokey nose against hers, chirring sweetly and turning his previous colour of rose-pink.

The other dragon blinked, the action audible. “Cute,” she rumbled, “but you’re not forgiven yet. I _needed_ you.” And her head swung, dragon and all, around to stare in a recriminating fashion at a pile of shredded papers shoved up angrily against the wall. “My new comics came in, and I couldn’t read them without you.” As though to demonstrate, a talon that made Hotch’s heart hammer just to see it stretched out to skewer an issue of _Spiderman_ effortlessly and lift it into the air with one shake of her huge paw. In what was unmistakably a whine, the dragon muttered, “Not from lack of trying,” and sadly watched the comic tear in two and fall to the pile.

“Oh no,” said Spencer, flying down to the comics and picking one up. “Don’t worry, my lovely song, I can fix it!”

“Don’t call me that,” Emily said with a huff. Spencer, busy whistling at the torn comic to make the pages weld back together, attempted to look as innocent as possible while a cheeky hint of smoke drifted from his mouth.

“What shouldn’t I call you, oh rhythm of my heart?” he asked, blinking rapidly.

Emily, with a single louder huff, blew a thick plume of smoke down onto him, obscuring the smaller dragon with smog. Unlike Spencer’s smoke, it was real and cloying and left grimy smears all over the polished floor and, when it cleared to reveal him, the thoroughly sooty dragon and his equally sooty comic book.

“Hymn of my life,” he whispered, grinning dragonly as she rumbled at him.

“You’re being an atrocious host to your guests,” she said finally, looking at them. “If they were dragons, they’d have eaten you already for such conduct. Why do they look like that?”

Hotch winced back from the two sharp regards that turned to them. Rossi was making strange noises now, JJ turning a bizarre red colour from the oppressive heat.

“They look normal to me,” said Spencer, vanishing and reappearing on Hotch’s shoulder. “Oh, wait. Why are you all damp, Agent?”

“It’s a little warm in here,” Hotch said carefully.

“Fuck _warm_ ,” wheezed Rossi, who Hotch was becoming increasingly concerned about as his complexion somehow paled and reddened all at once. “It’s hotter than Satan’s ballsa—”

“Oh, sorry.” Spencer turned his ‘sorry’ colour, before flicking back to pink. “I can also fix that.”

He opened his mouth and made a sound so strange to Hotch’s ears that he would be unable to describe it after, a sound all jumbled and mixed and with hints of ice creaking and rain falling and a sharp breeze all twisted together. In a heartbeat, the temperature dropped to that of a brisk fall evening, leaving them shivering with the harsh contrast. The roof began to drip, Emily turning her head upwards with a sedate swing of her armoured throat to stare at it.

“The ceiling is precipitating,” she said blandly, licking a water drop.

“Too much?” asked Spencer.

“Too much,” Hotch said, and sneezed. Spencer repeated the noise, less shrilly, and the temperature evened out. Gratefully, Hotch breathed again, eyeing Rossi out the corner of his eye as the other man closed his eyes and sagged with relief, Morgan standing close to his side. Spencer watched them with fascination, his eyes ticking from Emily to the team and doing a strange tappy kind of dance as his front paws patted at the floor with his eagerness to, Hotch assumed, find out their opinion on his ‘beautiful’ girlfriend.

Spencer, he realised, was showing _off_ , and it was delightfully human and also a painful reminder that, despite being a dragon, he was possibly very, very young.

“Refreshments for your guests,” Emily said to Spencer, in what was clearly supposed to be a whisper but also made Hotch’s head ring a little still. “And you can introduce us properly?”

“Oh, _yes!”_ Spencer leapt up, bounding away and calling back, “I think I remember how to make tea!”

“Oh no,” said JJ.

 

* * *

 

Emily, proving to be a gracious host once alleviated of her irritation with her partner, seated them on small cushions she plucked from the nooks on the side of the home—Spencer’s, Hotch assumed, since she could barely reach a talon into them—and spoke to them while Spencer fetched refreshments for the parched agents.

“You have no idea what could be causing the dragons’ disappearances?” Hotch asked her, resisting the urge to duck as she shook her head and made his ears pop.

“None. Everything I know, Spencer has undoubtedly already told you. The only thing I could possibly add is that the other dragons _are_ finally becoming concerned.” She blinked, puffing a small thread of choking smoke before breathing it back in before it could drift over them. “While Spencer was gone for such an abominably long time, they discussed his mission. Most of them think it’s insane.”

“Then why did they let him go?” Rossi asked.

Emily stared at him. Unlike Spencer, her hide remained the same midnight black, giving no hint to whatever emotion she was feeling when her smooth, rounded voice remained as steadfastly blank as it was. “We do not stop each other from doing what we believe is right,” she said. “We can only suggest other alternatives. To _stop_ him would be assuming more power over each other than we possess. The idea is disconcerting. We don’t have to agree with him to stand by him.”

“But you’re _huge_ ,” Morgan pointed out. “You could stop him?”

Emily snorted, not managing to stop all the smoke that escaped her mouth and nostrils this time and setting JJ to coughing. “Nonsense. That’s repulsive. He does as he does and _I_ , for one, think he’s right. Rash, perhaps, but right. We do need you—we’re just too slow to react to something as immediate as this. It’s how we are. Spencer thinks like a human most of the time, not a dragon.” Now, Hotch fancied he heard something else in her tone: the same pride and joy that Spencer voiced when he spoke of her. “He’s the most brilliant dragon there’s ever been, so clever and _quick_. Did you know it only took him two years to decide upon you guys?” She made it sound like such a small time, her eyes slipping half-closed as she spoke.

“This might be rude,” Rossi began, which Hotch knew meant it was almost certainly going to be _incredibly_ rude, “but how old are you?”

“Four-hundred and three,” Emily answered promptly. “Spencer is three-hundred and twenty-four—we’re barely out of the egg. It’s why they don’t listen to us, not even me, and you’d think _I_ would have some sway.”

“Emily was sung by one of the only dragons left of the Old Guard,” Spencer explained, appearing with a tray of tiny tea-cups with handles clearly made for paws, not hands. “Her, um—your equivalent is ‘mother’, I guess—was an ambassador for the dragons to the human race, back when such things were needed.”

“Before they realised that eating makes for much faster diplomacy,” Emily added, baring her fangs. It was a disturbing grin, very, very toothy, dangerously wide, and completely out of place on a dragon’s face.

“Sorry.” Spencer glared at her, eyes flickering. “Emily has a terrible sense of humour. Emily, don’t _laugh_ at them like that.”

Emily blinked, tail whisking. Not a single other muscle on her face twitched. Hotch heard Rossi swear, very softly.

Hotch, knowing the dragon well enough by now to know that he hid important things in the middle of endless inane chatter, zeroed in on what he saw a pertinent to the matter at hand: “Your people sing to reproduce?” he asked. “Is that what you mean by ‘Emily was sung’?”

Spencer nodded. Morgan, who’d picked up one of the delicate tea-cups and was about to sip from it, snorted. “I’d _wondered_ how you do it,” he said, too loud. JJ closed her eyes, mouth thinning. Hotch just sighed inwardly.

“Do ‘it’?” Spencer asked, head tilting curiously. “Do what?”

“Yeah, Morgan, do _what?”_ Rossi wasn’t going to let this go, ignoring Hotch’s glare.

“You know…” Morgan trailed off, stuck between Spencer’s unrelenting stare and Hotch’s intimidating glare. But, of course, he powered on: “…sex. Because Emily is… large. Err. Than you.” He coughed, and not because of the smoke, adding, “But very beautiful,” as JJ covered her mouth.

Emily silently stared him down, emotionless.

“Oh, ah,” Spencer said, “we’re not biological, as such. Not as you understand us to be—our reproduction is less… creative.” Judging from his rapid-fire blinking, Hotch had the distinct feeling that Spencer’s ‘research’ had covered the act of human procreation. “It’s simple, really. When a dragon wishes to be born, it sings, and we answer. Then it becomes.”

Silence followed this.

“Simple?” Rossi asked wryly.

Spencer seemed pleased that they’d gotten it so easily. “Yeah!” he chirped. “Except, well, that’s not happening anymore. Dragons are still singing to be born—but the ones who answer are the ones who disappear.”

“We’ve always given ourselves completely to our songs, but never _this_ completely,” Emily murmured, finally showing the first hint of worry as her yellow eyes faded to grey. “It’s not just the song to bring life anymore either—all the songs take something from us.”

“What?” Spencer looked up at her, flashed white with panic. A flicker of movement in the corner of Hotch’s eye distracted him momentarily, finding Rossi fishing a leaf from his teacup and staring at it—a cursory glance down into his own cup showed that his was filled with soggy leaves as well. “That wasn’t happening when I left. It’s getting worse?”

Emily nodded, reaching out and gently bumping him with her nose. Despite how gentle the touch was, he still almost fell over with the force of it. “We all weaken,” she said. “We all feel it. Can’t you?”

“No.” Spencer looked troubled. “I don’t feel anything…”

“Can’t you just not sing?” JJ asked. “I understand that it’s a big part of your lives, but if it’s hurting you—could you abstain until we discover what’s happening?”

“No,” Spencer said again, shaking his head adamantly. “You don’t understand, Agent Jareau. If a dragon sings to be born, whoever is chosen _must_ answer—every dragon is born for a reason. We could no more deny that dragon the life it requests than you could deny the need to breathe or Agent Hotchner could deny his son the love he requires to thrive. It’s innate. Emily and I, we’re too young to have ever sung for a child before—”

“But not so young anymore,” Emily cut in. “We’ve flown together for two hundred years now—our melody is known. It could be any decade now that we’re chosen.”

“Or never at all,” Spencer said, frowning in a very human fashion. “Do you want a hatchling?”

“Do you?” Emily retorted.

Hotch had the distinct feeling they’d stumbled onto a personal conversation, clearing his throat to remind the two dragons that they were there. “If that’s the case,” he said as the dragons looked at him, “then we need to move fast. If the call is that inescapable, it’s of the utmost importance that we investigate it before…” He didn’t finish the sentence, but they all knew what followed.

“We do know one thing,” Emily said, settling back from where she’d risen slightly in place. By Hotch’s side, Morgan had gulped his tea down and—evidently—regretted it, trying to hide his spluttering. “The leaks that led Spencer to your team—they’re from the Wellspring. They have to be. No other source of magic could be so corrupting as to warp the humans it touches into the acts Spencer says your team has witnessed. If you’re going to start looking, it needs to be there.”

“Have you been there?” Hotch queried, brain whirling.

“No. No dragon has. We’re creatures of magic—we would be devoured instantly. That’s why the dragons have finally agreed that we need you.” Emily nudged Spencer again, laying her head next to him so he could nuzzle against her with a soft purring hum. “My Spencer knew before them how important you would be.”

“I _am_ yours,” Spencer said happily, turning yellow again. “But perhaps you should tell the other dragons… they don’t, uh, really follow me when I talk.”

“No, they don’t,” Emily said. “But then again, who does? You’re a _weird_ dragon.”

Despite this, there was definitely pride in her tone. She stood, taking an incredibly long time to finally reach her full, immeasurable height—she just didn’t seem like she should be able to _fit—_ and ambling from the room with slow, heavy thuds of her great paws. By the time she was fully out of the room, it had been a good few minutes of the sound of her tail hissing across sandstone before the sound of clapping wingbeats shook the air. And, then, she was gone.

“We’ll leave after you’ve rested,” Spencer announced, whistling more pillows into place around them. “It’s a long hike.”

“Of course it is,” Rossi grumbled, holding his teacup up. “Are these rose leaves?”

“Yes! I’d wondered if you’d like them!” Spencer seemed pleased, even as JJ winced and sipped at her cup with a carefully focused expression. “The book said tea is made by boiling leaves, and humans seem ever so fond of roses. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” lied JJ bravely. Hotch didn’t answer, just pretended to sip, retaining his dignity.

“Okay, I gotta ask,” Morgan burst out with, “if you guys don’t have sex, do you even _have_ genitals?”

“Morgan!” JJ’s hiss was a little more shocked than Rossi’s gleeful one, but they were both just as forceful.

“No,” said Spencer, unconcerned. “Why would we need them? We’re made of magic.” _Duh_ said his tone, despite his even words.

“So your size determines your biological sex?” Morgan continued, clearly fascinated. Hotch didn’t ask him to stop, a little curious himself. “Or are you just tiny?”

“Sexual dimorphism in dragons is pronounced.” Spencer picked up his own cup, drinking from it without a qualm. “Males such as myself are small—but we’re highly magical. Emily’s abilities are limited since her resources go into supporting her great size and flight, but I can do so much more. Both sexes are integral—we complete each other.”

“What makes you male?” Morgan pressed.

Spencer seemed nonplussed. “What makes _you_ male?” he retorted.

“Huh,” said Morgan.

Rossi rubbed his eyes. “I need a drink.”

Spencer brightened. “I can fix that!” he chirped, and whistled, two more cups of tea appearing in front of Rossi’s feet. “There you go!”

“Thanks,” said Rossi after a beat. “So, when do we leave?”

“Soon,” was all Spencer replied, curling up and going to sleep. Hotch really, _really_ hoped that he meant a human’s idea of ‘soon’—and not a dragon’s.

 

* * *

 

Whatever they’d been expecting when Spencer took them to the ‘Wellspring’ that they spoke of, it wasn’t this. An endless hike through some of the most remote areas Nevada had to offer, getting hotter and tireder as they went, until the sun was dipping down overhead, bringing with it the promise of night—and they arrived. In front of them, as Spencer hung back warily, was a shack made of iron and tin and sheets of cheap plywood. Hotch blinked and narrowed his eyes, expecting some kind of illusion.

“I can’t go in,” Spencer said, sitting back on his haunches and studying the shack with his eyes whirling. “You have to go alone from now on.”

“How will we know what we’re looking for?” JJ asked.

It was Rossi who answered, taking a deep breath and wiping sweat from his forehead before striding forward. “I get the feeling we’ll just _know_.” With that said, they filed one by one into the tiny shack, Hotch bringing up the rear and wryly wondering if they were all going to fit.

They did, barely. Inside the shack was a well. Hotch peered in, Morgan shining a flashlight over his shoulder and into the gloomy depths. From deep down, something glinted blue. There was a long moment where they all lingered, wondering what came next, before Hotch sighed and reached for the knotted rope strung overhead.

“I’m way too old for this,” he grumbled, but began to climb down nonetheless. It was a gruelling, painful climb, his palms sweaty on the thick rope and burning when he slipped and slid at places, and it was long. He kept climbing for long enough that, when he looked up, he couldn’t see the dusty light of the shack anymore, nor the others peering down waiting for him to finish his climb. He’d been sure that one of them—JJ, he thought—had started the climb already, but he couldn’t see her, nor feel the sway her weight would have on the rope. But there was no going back, and a firm sense of being very safe had settled on him, even though he most definitely wasn’t. There was no doubt in his mind that Spencer would never send him somewhere dangerous, and, perhaps, he thought, as the feeling of safe grew stronger and stronger until he was absolutely relaxed despite his precarious grip, there was magic at play here.

Eventually, the feeling compounded: Hotch was absolutely sure that he could simply let go. He would be fine. Nothing here could hurt him.

He let go and braced for the fall.

It didn’t come. He found himself standing on firm rock in a dark cavern that slowly grew lighter as his eyes adjusted, the rope hanging limp by his side from a perfectly round hole in the ceiling. The cavern was silent. It was dark, except for where it wasn’t, and Hotch took a breath as clarity returned in a terrifying rush: had he really just let go of a rope without being sure of the ground below him? Or had he known he was on the ground? Or was there more at play than his own perceptions right now?

Uneasy, he turned to look behind him, at more endless dark, and then turned back to find the Wellspring before him. In the dark that had been there, all there was now was light: a deep pool of glittering light that swayed and whirled much like Spencer’s eyes did, with the same sedate hurry. It was blue one moment, green the next, yellow again, blue once more, in a hypnotic rush of something Hotch couldn’t quite understand. He only realised he’d been staring without looking away when there was a gasp and JJ appeared next to him, looking around wildly before looking to him and, then, turning to the pool.

“Whoa,” she said, breaking the spell.

“Whoa,” he agreed. He shook his head and walked forward slowly, wary of Spencer’s description of dragons who’d been torn apart by this innocuous—well, it was hardly more than a puddle in width, despite how deep it might be. “Don’t touch it. We don’t know what it can do. Where are the others?”

“Rossi is waiting above, Morgan’s on his way,” she said, right as Morgan appeared beside her, blinking rapidly and staring up at the hole he definitely had _not_ fallen from. “What are we looking for?”

“Evidence, I expect,” Hotch said.

The pool whirled at _expect_ , the sides creeping towards him. He backed away fast, not wanting that luminous liquid to touch against his shoes, but it was already withdrawing—leaving behind a glowing imprint sunken into the rock where it had touched, as though the rock was a soft clay instead of impenetrable stone. The imprint was a palm-print, four finger-marks above and a round smear below with others more indistinct around that—as though someone had kneeled by the pool to trail their fingers in the light. But the handprint glowed red and, as Hotch watched, began to ooze black from the finger-marks, that black dripping in a viscous trail towards the brightly glowing not-water until it touched.

Where it touched, the pool flashed and darkened, the magic vanishing and leaving a void until the pool readjusted to fill the gap left behind. The handprint faded with a hiss that sounded almost like a whispered scream, the stone returning to how it had been and leaving Hotch with nothing but the memory of the scene on his retinas.

“What the fuck?” said Morgan, expressing all their thoughts quite accurately.

Something rustled behind Hotch. He turned, pulling his flashlight from his jacket and aiming it into the dark.

The dark looked back.

Weapons came up, JJ’s and Morgan’s, but Hotch recognised it. The dark around them wasn’t natural, not completely—as he slowly moved the flashlight over it, glints of _alive_ flickered up around him. Nightmares. Thousands of them, clustered at the walls, trying to keep out of the light of the Wellspring.

“It’s okay,” he said, stepping forward and crouching with his hand out, fingers trembling. Fear struck: he did _not_ want to put his hand into that quivering dark, but he also knew this was something he could take from here and show Spencer. “I’ve seen these before. They’re harmless… if you’re awake.”

And, with that, he took a deep breath and plunged his arm into the black, snapping his grip shut tight as it surged and wiggled around him, rustling gently as it tried to escape. But he had at least one—he pulled his hand free of the dark and looked at the puff trapped between his fingers, wondering how he was going to climb out without it escaping.

A water canteen appeared beside him, JJ holding it out. “In here,” she suggested. “Will it fit?”

It did, vanishing within and huddling down in the corner, the water seemingly repulsed by its strange fur. Wiping his hand free of the itchy touch of it, Hotch watched JJ screw the cap shut, before turning back to the spring. “Keep looking,” he said firmly. “Take note of anything you see—we’ll need to tell Spencer everything.”

 

* * *

 

When they emerged from the cavern with more questions than answers, Emily was waiting atop a nearby bluff. Large enough that, for a moment, Hotch had thought that she was simply part of the scenery, until he looked up and saw Spencer flying around her wide-open eye.

The team walked towards her and then realised that she wasn’t alone. The mountains around them shifted.

“Agent Hotchner,” rumbled the very sky itself, or so it seemed. Hotch swallowed, looked up, and found the group surrounded by monoliths of dragons who themselves had smaller ones orbiting them. The night sky was barely visible beyond their mass. “What have you found?”

The dragon who spoke was as black as Emily, although she was the only one. JJ’s flashlight darted from one dragon to another, illuminating green and gold and a deep olive-purple before she finally lowered it with a low sound of awe. The males were jewels in the sky compared to the females, their hides so bright that they almost glowed as they flittered from perch to perch, chattering amongst themselves in high, shrill voices like reptilian parrots.

There was a _pop_ , and Spencer appeared on his shoulder, wrapping his tail around Hotch’s throat in what Hotch imagined he thought was a comforting gesture.

“We’re unsure of what the Wellspring normally looks like,” Hotch began warily, trying not to shout even though his instincts told him that surely not every great head looming above could hear his tiny human voice. “But currently it’s quite small in width. Surrounded by darkness.”

“There was a glowing handprint that oozed black,” JJ added, the canteen in her hand. “And we found this.”

Spencer whistled, the canteen floating out of her hands to hover in front of his nose, the cap unscrewing. The nightmare inside tipped out as the canteen flipped upside-down, trying to flee, but Spencer swooped in one easy motion and pinned it down.

Voices murmured. “A nightmare?” said one. “Unimportant.” Another expressed concern about the small size of their magical pool—yet another pointed out that the Wellspring appeared as it was expected to appear, and how could humans possibly expect the majesty that it truly was?

Hotch watched Spencer sniff at the nightmare. “The black that came from the print… it dissolved the magic where it touched it. It was as though the magic it touched ceased to exist.”

“Impossible,” Spencer replied, head snapping up to stare at him. “Magic is everything. Everything can’t just _cease_. If it did, there would be…” He trailed off.

“Nothing,” whispered the dragons with voices like a storm’s trailing breeze.

“Don’t eat that,” Emily said suddenly, slithering down the bluff she was perched on and landing with shocking silence considering her size. “Let it go. Stop touching it.” Despite the general outcry from the other dragons, Spencer immediately let go of the nightmare, his skin turning a sharp grey-white with shock and worry as he found his paws stained black. The nightmare scuttled away, dragons bickering overhead as they argued about whether it should be allowed to escape—until, Emily cried, “Don’t!”

Another dragon had dived for it, a little male with a hide speckled white like stars. He caught the nightmare with his paws, snapping it into his mouth and glowering at Spencer with it held tightly there. Another male darted down next to him, nudging his jaws with his own muzzle and making the same kind of gentle lilting whistle that Spencer made to Emily, a crooning kind of call. “We can’t let it escape,” the new one said sharply, his tail lashing around to wrap around the male holding the nightmare. “It’s our only hint at what’s happening. Nightmares shouldn’t be down there—the Wellspring isn’t _fear_ , it’s belief. Why do you think dragons fly?”

“Because humans dreamed we would,” Spencer answered, still holding his black-stained paws out. “What could create nightmares like _that_?”

He said _that_ with revulsion in his voice, because the nightmare held tightly in the other dragon’s jaw was fighting like no other nightmare Hotch had seen, its fluffy puffs stretching and tightening into ropes of sticky black that dripped as it attempted to escape. But, before any of them could answer, the ropes of ooze snapped up and lashed around the speckled male’s jaws, the nightmare lurching itself down his throat and pulling tight. The dragon’s shrill cry of shock was cut off as the ooze bubbled up and around his head, ignoring the claws that lashed at it. The one who’d landed beside him cried out, a sound like bells crashing, and tried to tear the nightmare from him. The surrounding dragons cried out too—males darting down to try and help while the females all exclaimed in horror.

“Oh no!” JJ gasped, leaping forward before any of them could think to stop her and grabbing at the bubbling nightmare, trying to wrench it from his jaws. It oozed up her arms too, the little dragon’s kicks getting weaker as it choked him—but did dragons breathe? Hotch tried to get closer but couldn’t without risking stepping on one of the clustered males below, looking around frantically for Spencer.

“JJ, let go!” he shouted, sure that it would kill her if it reached her mouth, and it was already above her elbows. But she just gritted her teeth and hung on grimly, pulling so hard that they could see muscles shifting in her arms, the speckled dragons gasping once as she almost succeeded in tearing it away. But it surged back, seeming to grow as though it was feeding from something.

Spencer trilled. It was a clear, concise noise, and it silenced the world. As soon as silence fell, he began to sing. Hotch covered his ears. The singing hurt, and only hurt more as other dragons joined in, a light growing with the sound of their song until he was deaf and blind and on his knees, trying not to listen because his brain couldn’t fathom a cry so desperate.

When it faded and Hotch opened his eyes, shocked to find he could still see, JJ was huddled with the speckled dragon limp in her arms, the nightmare gone and his eyes blinking slowly. The other dragon with it was white with shock, clawing his way up JJ until he was huddled in her lap too, wrapped around the speckled male with rose whirling in his eyes as he nuzzled gently at him.

The speckled male whistled tiredly, head drooping.

“I’ve never seen a nightmare I couldn’t eat,” said the female who’d spoken first, the black who dwarfed even Emily in size.

“I have,” Spencer said softly, every dragon looking to him. “They’re what happens when a monster dreams.”

Uneasy, Hotch said, “There’s no such thing as monsters,” despite how stupid a statement that was when surrounded by dragons.

“Isn’t there, Agent Hotchner?” asked Emily. “Wouldn’t that make your job rather redundant?”

Hotch went cold, but it was Rossi who spoke. “You’re saying the people we… serial killers, our unsubs, they created that? Or people like them?”

“Who else?” said Spencer. “What’s more nightmarish than death?”

And Emily added, “Why do you think Spencer went to you? The people you hunt are followed by whatever is changing the Wellspring—these strange nightmares, apparently. Wherever they go, the nightmares follow, and the Wellspring weakens with it.”

“But what came first?” Morgan asked warily. “There have always been murderers, so why is it changing things now? Why not before?”

“That,” said the black dragon, “is exactly what we need you to answer, agents. And fast. That song hurt us.”

She wasn’t lying. In the light of the oncoming dawn, Hotch could see—every dragon there, in ways they hadn’t been before they’d sung to save the speckled dragon’s life, was faded. Eyes duller and colours muted.

Even Emily.

Even, Hotch realised with a thrum of fear, Spencer.


	3. Refrain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _~ A dragon weakens ~ The loneliest song ~ Confrontation approaches ~ The death of magic ~ The dragons leave ~_

It wasn’t often that Hotch found himself choosing between his work and his family as, regrettably, his work almost always came first. Today, his hand was forced.

“Look, if we take all the places your recent cases have taken you and mark them on this map, like this…” Spencer worked busily at the corkboard, picking pins up with his mouth and pushing them in as he levitated himself into place with his wings tucked. Hotch half-watched, half busily texted Jessica, who was fretting over Jack. He’d been acting strange, listless and withdrawn, and she was worried he was ill. “…there are central points. Look. Hotch, Hotch, _look_.”

Hotch looked up. “Huh?”

Everyone was staring at him, Spencer puffing grumpy smoke as he jabbed his muzzle at the corkboard.

“Sorry, Jack’s unwell,” he said, trying to refocus on the case right before his cell dinged again with a worrisome, _I think it might be his appendix._ “How large is the central point?”

“They all encompass several blocks in business districts, mostly high-rises, across several state capitals—including Las Vegas. Almost all completely zoned for business—but narrowing that down further could be difficult, unless there’s a ‘Evil Incorporated’ there we haven’t noticed yet.” Garcia tapped at her keyboard busily. “Hmm. There are a few businesses with offices sort of close to those areas, but not consistently across all seven of those zones.”

“Investors with shares in several companies, or perhaps contractors?” Hotch asked, right as his phone hummed again. _Should I take him to the ER?_ Jessica’s text read.

“Hotch, if you have to go, we’ve got this,” Rossi said, glancing at the cell. “The dragons waited ten years to bring this up to us, they can wait another day while you’re there for your son.”

Spencer flew over, landing on Hotch’s shoulder and curling close in a warm, velvety pressure around his throat. “It’s true,” he trilled, turning a nauseating shade of cream. “And Jack shouldn’t sicken without us there with him.”

It wasn’t something Hotch was comfortable with, leaving early in the middle of a case that could have spiralling repercussions on every case they’d worked recently—but nor was he comfortable with not knowing for sure how sick Jack was. “Okay,” he said finally, tidying his papers into his briefcase and making a mental note to send Strauss an email, “but call me if you need _anything_ , or if anything new comes up.”

“Absolutely,” Rossi said breezily, the _not_ he’d left off but definitely intended hanging unsaid in the air between them. Sighing, Hotch gathered his belongings, gathered his dragon—who seemed determined to be there if Jack was sick—and left.

Jack, once returned home to his own bed, worsened. Hotch hovered with water and a cool compress for his flushed face, keeping a wary eye on his son. If it was his appendix, they’d be making a dash to ER—and with every passing hour, he was beginning to suspect it was. Despite Jack’s assurances that it was just a sore belly, the fever was worrying. Spencer sat beside Jack’s bed, occasionally lowering the temperature gently in the room and refreshing the cool compress when it warmed. Other than that, he was silent.

“Call me if you need me,” Hotch said when Jack’s eyes began to droop, leaving him to rest with Spencer standing guard overhead as though he was carved from the wood of the headboard. To his office Hotch went, with the door cracked open so he could hear if he was called for while he continued to work on the case with the team conferencing in through his laptop. They made progress, compiling a list of those names that shared travel or time within each of those central zones from where the bulk of their cases had radiated out from, like a leach of evil from a singular point. However, the list was long and the work was tiring.

Eventually, he looked up, startled to find that silent hours had passed and there wasn’t a sound in the darkened home other than the sound of his own actions. It was quiet enough that he could hear the fridge humming downstairs and the soft _tock tock tock_ of a moth battering itself against the overhead light-shade. With trepidation, he slid from his office chair and padded up the hall, pushing open Jack’s door from where it had inexplicably swung shut.

As soon as he opened the door, he could hear it: the singing.

The whole room glowed, a soft, ocean light radiating out from the dragon no longer perched on the bed-head but now curled up on his sleeping son’s belly. One of Jack’s hands rested on Spencer’s back, his face cast into an inhumanly angelic glow by the gleaming dragon. And Spencer was singing, his muzzle tipped back and his scales pulsing with that same soft light that spilled out and over the boy below him, washing over the bed and pooling with Jack’s stomach as a central point.

Abruptly, as Hotch watched, Spencer stopped singing and turned to look at him.

“Does this song have a name?” Hotch asked, not entirely sure what else to ask in this moment.

“No,” answered the dragon after a moment of thinking, and he yawned widely. Curling tighter with the flow fading out and leaving the room darker than ever, he added, “Healing hurts, always. We’ll sleep now,” and closed his eyes.

Wondering truly about the nature of dragons, Hotch checked Jack’s fever—gone—and left the two to their deep slumber. It was lunchtime the next day before Jack roused, bright-eyed and energetic as he bounced downstairs with the still-sleeping dragon in his arms. Despite how small Spencer was, it still took both of Jack’s arms to carry him.

“Is he okay?” he asked of his father, holding out the dragon, who kicked a little in his sleep, paws tucked close.

“I think so,” Hotch said, taking Spencer from his son and examining him. His colour was healthy, he supposed, and he felt his usual temperature. “I think he’s just tired.”

“Oh.” Jack studied the dragon too. “If you’re going back to work, I can look after him. I’m all better now—I can put him in his favourite spot! That will make him happy when he does wake up.”

It was decided that Jessica would come to remain with Jack for the rest of the day while Hotch returned to work, and Hotch followed his son to place the dragon in his ‘spot’. His spot, as it turned out, was the bottom of the closet in the spare room, where a cosy nest had been made out of a hoard of books, papers, and what looked like Hotch’s spare ties, with a dragon-sized impression sunken into the centre.

“Spencer says gold is boring, he’d rather hoard books,” Jack announced, as Hotch placed the dragon in his depression and watching him grumble and tuck tightly in, tail over his nose. “He says he has a friend who hoards cactuses—and thinks it’s silly, because no one can nest on a _cactus_. And Emily hoards _guns_ , which is so so so cool, don’t you think?”

Hiding a smile, Hotch left his son watching the dragon sleep, and returned to work.

One day later, Spencer awoke, appearing on Hotch’s desk and almost oversetting his mug of coffee. Unlike the healthy blue he’d been when Hotch had deposited him in his closet, he was now chalk-white and puffing frantic smoke.

“Are you okay?” Hotch asked, panic stealing into his thoughts. He’d let the dragon sleep—assuming that was correct—but had it been a mistake? Had he done something to hurt him?

“Yes, but no,” Spencer fretted, smoke pooling around him and obscuring his features in a foggy haze. “We have to go to Emily—something is _wrong!”_

Although he’d never led them wrong before, Hotch hoped that—somehow—he was leading them wrong this time. But, as it turned out, he was not.

When they arrived at the sandstone home, Emily was weakening.

 

* * *

 

“Oh no!” Spencer cried, flying up to Emily’s nose and perching, peering worriedly into her whirling eyes. She peered back, crooning a little with a loving sound that shook the ground below them. “You’re sick! Why didn’t you call me? I slept so long and all the time, you _needed_ me.”

The team hung back, all of them noting the dingy greyness of her scales and the lank way she was sprawled. The sandstone home was almost cold within, the thump that had resonated below them the first time they’d come here now slow and tired.

“I’m okay,” Emily said as Spencer scampered up her nose and snuggled close between her eyes. “Just tired. We’re all tired, all of us females… being big is tough, you know, little weirdo.”

Spencer whistled a worried note, white almost the whole way through. “Oh no, oh no,” he chattered. “What can we do? What can I do?”

“Are you making progress?” Emily asked of them, her eyes as dull as her scales. “We may have waited too long. The older males sicken too, and I will _riot_ if my Spencer grows ill.” Despite the weakness threading through her voice, her tone was firm and almost snarling. “He won’t fade because of those stuck-up, lazy, overgrown, bureaucratic reptiles, not if I have anything to say in the matter. And I _do_.”

“Some progress,” Hotch said, glancing at the others. Garcia was still compiling names—Morgan having stayed behind to help her narrow them down. Time was running out. He closed his eyes for a moment, both to distract himself from the fretful dragon and his ailing mate and to picture, vividly, the Wellspring with its hint of shadow bubbling at the side. Except, in his mind, the shadow no longer bit at the sides—it threaded through, like a nightmare but not so easily eaten. Devouring everything pure where it touched. They needed to find the source, but what could poison _magic?_ “Is there anything, anything at all, that could corrupt the Wellspring, and the nightmares?”

“Nothing that I know of,” Emily said, Spencer shaking his head as well. “It’s never been done, not ever. Not in all the history of dragons, and there’s a _lot_ of dragon history.”

“Well,” Spencer whispered suddenly, and they all stared at him, Hotch’s heart sinking. “Maybe… one thing. The Wellspring creates us… we are born from magic, and to magic we return upon our cessation, usually. We both gain and give our purity from the magic within—but if a dragon was somehow corrupted and given to it? Maybe? It seems _unlikely_. I can’t think what would corrupt a dragon so fiercely that it would destroy magic itself. And it would take more than one dragon.”

“The nightmares at the Wellspring,” Hotch said out loud, mind racing, “the ones you couldn’t eat… you said they were created by a monster dreaming—the murderers we hunt. Would murdering a dragon have the same effect, but magnified?”

Emily growled, the sound shaking the world, or so it felt. JJ stumbled, Rossi catching her arm. “No one has murdered a dragon in human generations,” she rumbled. “We would _know_. We know every dragon born!”

“Where do the babies go?” JJ asked, the words dropping into the stark silence that followed them. “You say dragons are singing to be born but not actually _being_ born—what happens to them?”

Both Spencer and Emily turned red as one, smoke belching from Emily’s mouth as she staggered up. “How _dare_!” she roared, almost dislodging Spencer until he screeched along with a sound like breaking glass and leapt from her nose to wheel around the air in jagged, furious circles. “A human! Only a human would be so _foul_!” And she lurched forward with dangerous speed, jaws clapping shut with enough force in front of the team that they all covered their ears. “I should eat every human!”

“We have to find out!” Spencer was crying, his flight-circle growing erratic: “We have to stop this! They are being born, they are, and something is _taking_ them!”

“JJ, you might have pissed them off,” Rossi said, grabbing Hotch’s arm and dragging him back from the furious dragon and her careless stamping.

“No,” Hotch said, pulling his arm loose and stepping forward, tipping his head back to stare fearlessly at the dragon as she swung her muzzle around to snarl at him. “They’re frightened. That concept is alien to them.”

Spencer went quiet, landing with his red fading back to white. As soon as her small partner was on the floor and in danger of being stamped upon, Emily froze, watching him warily. “Who would hurt the young?” he whispered, shrinking down. “But, yes, an act like that… forcing them to be created… and hurting them. It would feed the act of their murder back into the Wellspring… but it doesn’t explain why dragons _began_ to die while singing in the first place. Or how they’re finding our young unless, unless a dragon is doing this…” He shuddered, Emily shuddering along. “We’ve been watching the Wellspring from a distance… nothing has entered.”

Whatever else would have followed that, it was forestalled by Hotch’s cell ringing: Morgan.

“You guys might want to listen to this,” he said grimly. “We’ve found something.”

The something was an urban legend. At the centre of their clustered cases, Garcia had dug up a series of buildings in Las Vegas that had inspired blogs posts and web serials about the ‘ghost’ that sung there.

“A dragon?” Hotch asked, scrolling through the endless pages of comments and theories from the people who’d heard the ‘wailing song’. It was believed that it inspired madness. There was a long series of blog posts from someone who Hotch wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out was being treated for some kind of mental instability. They ascribed the songs to the voice of God, an impossible to shut-out sound that drove their every action. It seemed to be a common theme that once the listeners began to actively look for the song, the quality of their posts deteriorated.

“Impossible,” said Spencer. “We’d hear a dragon. Every dragon can hear every song we sing… no dragon sings _alone_.”

But, he seemed troubled.

“There’s a not statistically insignificant number of suicides in the area too,” Garcia said, skimming the data report from the police readout she’d downloaded. “High drug use, uber high gambling levels—well, Vegas, but you know—basically, this zone is escapism plus. Lots of unhappy people clustered all together, being unhappy. Like that song.”

“ _Mad World_?” Rossi asked.

“ _Shiny Happy People_.”

Spencer opened his mouth to say something, earning a sharp look from Hotch. “It _won’t_ be a dragon,” he said instead of whatever he had been about to say, hunching his wings up angrily and flickering red. “It must be a human. It must!”

He was wrong.

As soon as they stepped out of the SUVs outside of the casino centred in the ‘hot spot’, Hotch felt it. An unsettling hum, like a distant mosquito whine on the air. Spencer seemed unperturbed. It made the hairs rise on Hotch’s arms, a headache already starting up. They were in town too late to get warrants to enter the premises, heading to the hotel to rest up after their flight—and Spencer still seemed unbothered, even when Rossi asked, “Anyone else hear that?”

Their hotel was directly across from the casino. As they ate dinner together, discussing the case in low voices with Spencer sprawled over Hotch’s shoulders eyeing his smoked salmon curiously, Hotch could see that everyone was on edge. Everyone _but_ Spencer. The sound didn’t fade with time—it had strengthened, as though their awareness of it made it stronger. Around them, conversation was muted, people looking tired. Three fights started over various tables of food, the occupants stalking away to avoid causing a scene when their bickering was noted.

“Yeah,” said Hotch. “Spencer? Can you hear it?”

The dragon shook his head. “We never fly here,” he said worriedly, huddling closer. No one was looking twice at him when usually he drew attention like a moth to flame, so Hotch assumed some magic was at play here keeping their table private. “It’s dangerous—too many human aircrafts. My home is about as close to the city as we get… but we should still hear it, if it is one of us, which it isn’t. I could hear Emily from DC, singing about how much she missed me.”

“Aw.” JJ barely hid the sound, covering her mouth as they looked at her.

“Aww,” added Rossi, not even bothering to hide it.

“Sleep on it,” Hotch suggested. “We’ll reconvene in the morning.”

 

* * *

 

They spent the next day going from casino to casino to hotel to business block in the circuit surrounding the bulk of the rumours. As they’d expected, the rumours seemed to radiate out from the aptly named _Ghostly Palace_ casino, directly adjacent to their hotel. Throughout the entire search, Spencer kept himself hidden, tucked into a small ball of sulking dragon on Hotch’s head, and the woeful song continued just outside of their perception. By the afternoon, they were all tense. JJ’s eyes were red, Rossi’s temper was short, Morgan looked exhausted and fraught, and Spencer still couldn’t hear a thing.

“We gotta get in there, Hotch,” Morgan said, looking at the building. “What are the chances we’ll get a warrant for ‘we hear a weird song’?”

“Low,” Hotch admitted, reaching his hand up to touch Spencer’s warm side. “As are the chances they’ll let us indiscriminately search.”

“What if they lie to us?” JJ asked. She looked at Spencer, eyes flicking to Hotch. “We approach the owner, ask him straight up if he has reason to believe there’s something untoward happening in the building… and if Spencer says lie, we call it in. We have precedent. He’s never been wrong before.”

“But is a Vegas judge going to believe that?” asked Rossi.

As it turned out, they didn’t need to approach a judge. The owner, as soon as he was shown what Spencer could do, gave them full access to the building.

“We’ve never been more profitable, but I can’t keep staff longer than a month,” he said, his own eyes bloodshot. “I can’t sleep, I’ve lost two employees to suicide in a year, and my security staff have never had so much trouble keeping order. If something weird is doing this, I want it out—search away. Guests will need to be warned before you enter their room though. I won’t allow invasions of privacy, I do have _some_ reputation.”

As it turned out, they wouldn’t need to search the rooms. Barely three hours into their slow search for the source of the song—one minute above, one minute below, Spencer explaining that if it _was_ dragon in source, the dragon could be hiding in its own hidden pocket of magic—they found their man. Because everything these days just seemed to want to subvert Hotch’s expectations, he was the kind of small, unassuming person you’d trust to watch your belongings while you ran to the bathroom. In fact, they’d have overlooked him completely if it weren’t for him stopping to stare at Spencer as they walked up the hall of the casino’s upper floors, and Spencer noting the black stains on the hand curled around a hospital-issued walking cane.

“Him!” cried Spencer, leaping forward. Hotch, with the reflexes born of years of fieldwork plus stopping his son from tumbling into danger, grabbed him by his haunches mid-air and hauled him back while the man fled. “Agent Hotchner, it’s him! Detain him!”

The man took off, and Spencer, after whistling angrily and making Hotch’s hands fly away from him as though magnetically repulsed, shot after him. Swearing, his weapon out and adrenaline up, Hotch gave chase—down three flights of stairs and into the basement of the building, almost braining himself on a pipe jutting out from the ceiling as he skidded to a stop and looked around. The lights down here didn’t seem to work, every corner and shadow bubbling threateningly at him. Nightmares, he realised. Just like those that had attacked the speckled dragon. Flashlight in hand, he sought to avoid touching any of them, despite the shadowy limbs that reached out for his shoes.

The song was louder down here. Painful. If Spencer’s song so long ago had been sadness, this one was agony. It was loneliness and misery and madness. Hotch, with less than twenty-four hours exposure to it, honestly thought that he’d have done almost anything if he’d believed it would make it stop. But there was no fleeing from it—Spencer was down here, along with him, the reason that the dragons were dying.

So, into the dark he crept. Down deeper and deeper and deeper until he didn’t think he was in the casino anymore at all, finding himself walking through rocky tunnels that dripped and oozed around him.

And, somehow, he didn’t think he was in Vegas anymore.

He was right.

He stepped out into the Wellspring. The man stood beside it. Spencer lingered by the door, his hide pale with fear. Wary of what Spencer had said—that the magic would consume him if he went too near—Hotch stepped in front of the little dragon and called out, “FBI, show me your hands!”

The man turned.

He was holding both a gun, and a dragon.

The dragon was small, its hide just as pale as Spencer’s—but not for the same reason. Hotch could see fear in the colour of Spencer’s skin, fear that was rapidly reddening to anger as he saw the dragon too, but the dragon the man was holding was so white as to be translucent. Its eyes were colourless and still, its body limp. It didn’t fight the man that held it.

“If you come towards me, I’ll throw it in,” said the man, hefting the dragon to show that he could do just that. The dragon, bizarrely, since Hotch could see it breathing, didn’t bother to defend itself, just made a soft sound like a moan and twisted its head away. “Trust me, you do _not_ want this thing touching your precious pond.”

“What have you done to him?” Spencer gasped. The dragon didn’t seem to hear him. “Who is that! Who are you? I’ve never seen this dragon—impossible, I know every dragon!”

Hotch eyed the gun, his own weapon heavy.

“There are others like me?” whispered the translucent dragon, the words keened—low and hurt, the same song a whale would sing. Against the wall, Hotch saw more nightmares flicker into being with every whisper of sound the dragon made. “There are not. We are alone, just him and me. No one listens…”

He closed his eyes again, jaws gaping. Hotch saw black within and felt ill. He had a feeling he knew what this man had been feeding this dragon, to make its song hurt so much.

“If there were others, they would come…” the dragon mewled.

Spencer didn’t even seem to hear it. “Why don’t you speak?” he called to the pale dragon. “What’s your name! Tell me who you are!”

“I never killed anyone, you can’t arrest me for murder,” the man kept saying. “All I’m doing is defending myself right now, and I never killed anyone. I just found this thing—a little egg in the desert, nothing looking for it, so I hatched it. Now it’s mine. Taking it away is stealing.”

“He would have been around you,” Hotch said out loud, his own brain ticking. “Around your dreams…”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Dragons, Hotch was beginning to realise, were so easily influenced by their surroundings. That was why Spencer had to be sure of them—to bring anyone cruel into their world would be to invite disaster. To have this baby—and he _was_ a baby, Hotch could tell now that he knew what to look for—surrounded by hate from before it had even been hatched—it was unlike any world any dragon alive today had ever lived in.

_Oh_ , he thought, looking again at the pale dragon.

They couldn’t hear him. No dragon could hear him—because no dragon understood how he was hurting.

“Others starting showing up, take one of those when the next one arrives,” the man rambled, pointing to a pile of nightmares that surged in the corner, fighting to get away as Hotch shone his flashlight over there. As the nightmares scattered, they revealed rock that was littered with jewelled glass—no, with _shells_. The missing young—maybe called by the dragon’s song? The only ones who could hear it because they didn’t know any different… Hotch felt himself tremble deep within as he realised: the baby dragons were being born here in order to save the pale dragon, summoned by his raw need. “But they kept getting born _wrong_ , so I chucked them in there. It eats dragons, you know. That pool. Gives me that black stuff in return, and that black stuff is _unreal._ I could market it, I swear. People do what I want when I use it on them. The value of my shares have soared since this thing showed up—that’s why you can’t have it.”

“Lay down your weapon,” Hotch tried, his voice even. “If you hurt any of us, you _will_ be arrested. And if you hurt that dragon, think of your profits… they’ll be gone…”

“If you take one step closer, I’ll shoot you,” the man warned, gun wavering.

Spencer’s eyes flickered red. “Lie,” he snarled, pacing forward. Hotch twitched, worried about how close he was getting to the pool of magic behind the man.

“Stay back!” the man yelled.

“Spencer!” Hotch hissed, but his dragon ignored him.

Spencer whistled. It was the same whistle he’d learned so long ago, the one that vanished every weapon. But, this time, nothing happened.

Spencer blinked, and then whistled again.

Nothing happened.

“Him or me!” yelled the man, throwing the dragon. He hit the ground with a whine, laying curled broken and small by the edge of the Wellspring—which began creeping towards him. As Hotch yelled and ran for the dragon, the man bolted into the depths of the shadows, gone in a heartbeat.

“I’ll go!” yelled Spencer, chasing the man with only one horrified look at the silent dragon. Unable to stop him, Hotch could do nothing but gather up the injured dragon and run after him, slowed by the fragile weight in his arms.

“Are you conscious?” he asked the dragon, who blinked at him.

“You’re talking to me?” he whispered, trying to focus on his face. “Are you bad too?”

Hotch slowed. Under his palms, the heartbeat was slowing. “Shit,” he murmured, looking around the unfamiliar tunnel he was in. “No, no I’m not bad. I’m an FBI agent—I help people. I can help you.”

“I called for help,” said the dragon. “I called and I called—like this.” And he opened his mouth and sung.

When it was done, Hotch was on his knees, his own eyes burning. It hurt to his core, knives driving deep and leaving him gasping for air under the impossible weight of infinite loneliness.

“No one listened…” the lonely dragon mewled, his very existence a source of relentless grief. If the healthy dragons were a symbol of hope and humanity, this broken creature who weighed barely anything in Hotch’s arms was everything cruel.

“I’m listening,” Hotch told him, realising what was happening as the heart stuttered and slowed, kneeling so he could hold the dragon close to his own chest. “I’m here and I’m listening… you’re not alone.”

He didn’t know what summoned Spencer to him—would later think it was how much grief he felt for this lonely creature, for the dragon who could never have a happy ending—but with a soft _pop_ Spencer appeared upon his shoulder, his colour already fading from red to a sad robin’s-egg blue as he peered down at the lonely dragon. A distant part of Hotch wondered where the man who’d done this was; a larger part knew that this was infinitely more important right now.

“I’m trying to listen,” Spencer said, climbing down Hotch until he too was huddled against his chest, their heartbeats in unison despite the one that was beating slower and slower. “I’m trying to—I would never ignore you, if only I could _hear_. What about this—you must be able to hear this—”

He began to sing the song that had no name. The one Hotch had heard him sing so long ago. The first.

Hotch closed his eyes and hoped the song would be enough, feeling more than seeing the blue light beginning to rise. Distant voices joined—other dragons—all of them trying to sing a song they’d never sung before, for a dragon they’d never sung with. All trying to mimic the lonely dragon’s broken song, so that he wouldn’t be alone, but without the pain and cruelty.

But the lonely dragon was quiet, his eyes half closed, and Hotch felt him die.

They’d never really know if he heard them.

“Oh,” whispered Spencer, tipping his head upwards. To Hotch’s shock, he saw something he’d never seen a dragon do before: he saw tears. “We didn’t help him…”

“No, you didn’t,” said a cruel voice behind them. Hotch lurched upright, turning with his arms full of dragon, to find the man standing there with his gun in hand, aimed right at him. There was no time to react.

The man pulled the trigger, Hotch reflectively falling back away from the bullet he knew would follow.

Spencer whistled, leaping forward.

And the gun didn’t vanish. The magic didn’t work, not in this dark, terrible place over the body of a murdered dragon—it didn’t work.

The bullet impacted the dragon mid-leap, blood hitting both Hotch and the shooter and Spencer, with a scream that was every sound every animal made when hurt beyond belief, vanished.

 

* * *

 

They led the man in cuffs from the building, every face there furious. Such a cruel act, to use the welfare of the doomed dragon to try and escape and for them to fail to save him anyway, combined with the savagery with which he’d hurt Spencer… there wasn’t a person among them who wouldn’t have seen him taken in for this.

But, when they stepped into the foyer with the man placidly walking along, Spencer’s blood still staining Hotch’s front, another man approached. “You have no grounds for this arrest,” he announced, introducing himself as the man’s lawyer. Hotch saw red, biting back his anger. “I request my client be released immediately—the charges you’ve laid against him are obscene! Attacking a federal agent—that was very clearly not a federal agent, it was a _dragon_. Dragons don’t have rights.”

“He’s right, Agent,” said the small man in their cuffs, his smile coldly disarming. Even with the singing gone, that smile was horrifying. “There’s no law against me defending myself from a _dragon_. They’re not even technically animals. I would know—I _am_ a lawyer.”

There was silence. Even the onlookers weren’t saying a word. But a voice crept into Hotch’s mind, as quietly dangerous a voice as he’d ever heard before.

It was Emily’s.

_Let him go,_ she said.

So, he did. “Very well,” he replied glibly, undoing the cuffs and gesturing to the door, the same dazed anger still thrumming through his brain. This man, this _monster_ , had no idea of the damage he’d done… the lives he’d destroyed. The influence he’d had on so many people to commit such terrifying atrocities, all because he’d found one lonely dragon egg left alone and hurt the baby within. All because he’d taken something that should have been pure and exposed it to such hatred that it couldn’t even cry for help. The only dragon in the world who sung such a fearful song—so there were no dragons alive who recognised the song to assist.

“Hotch, what the hell are you doing?” Morgan exclaimed, JJ making a noise of horror behind them as well. Rossi was silent, standing back and letting whatever happened, happen.

The man walked away freely towards the front door. “See,” he was saying, still smiling that smile with his black-stained hands visible. “I knew you’d see sense. Honestly, keeping a creature like that in public is downright dang—”

He’d stepped outside into the shadows of the overcast day and fallen silent, Hotch and the team following. And no one made a sound.

It wasn’t clouds blocking the sun.

Overhead, dragons loomed. There was no noise except for distant cars and slot machines, everyone in the vicinity the kind of silent that came with being fearful of their very lives. Every building held rows of dragons of all sizes, wings hunched and rustling. Dragons picked their careful way across the street like stalking cats. Males landed on every lamppost and vehicle, all the same furious red.

“What do you know,” said Emily quietly, stepping ever so carefully closer and doing what Hotch now recognised as ‘smiling’ right near the man’s chalk-white face, “there doesn’t appear to be a law against dragons defending themselves against _you_. Is there, Agent Hotchner?”

Hotch paused, weighing his options. But, as he did so, he looked up and saw a tiny blue ball curled up atop Emily’s head, watching the proceedings with his very _alive_ eyes open. And, in that rush of relief, Hotch smiled. “No,” he said, stepping back from what was about to happen. “No, I don’t believe there is. And I would know… I _was_ a lawyer.”

Emily lurched forward.

 

* * *

 

Every story has a culmination. Unfortunately, for the Wellspring, the culmination of this story wasn’t a happy ever after.

“What happens if it keeps fading?” Hotch asked as they emerged from checking the still-dimming depths of the magical pool. It was smaller than the last time they’d been here. The lonely dragon’s song might have finally ended, but the damage was done. That man’s torture was slowly draining the last of the magic from the world, devoured by the deaths of the baby dragons and the sickness now visible in every dragon. Spencer and Emily were waiting, both of their heads lowered. There was no sign of the lonely dragon’s body; the dragons had taken it to grieve him privately.

“Dreams fade with it,” Emily said sadly. Her skin was grey, as was Spencer beside her, his injury still visible and barely healed. Every dragon dulled. None of them had magic to spare to heal the bullet-wound completely. “Hope dies. Humans forget to think of things bigger than them… you’ll continue, but less. No bird sings without a song in its heart.”

“So, what do we do?” JJ asked. Hotch knew she was thinking of her son. They’d seen what happened to those cut off from the good of magic—those who were twisted and bitter. Was that the future they were looking towards? Nothing but misery and sadness and people being cold?

No music, no art, no stories to tell?

“You do nothing,” said the once-black dragon, the one that was larger than Emily. “It is our turn to do our part. We will deliberate together, every dragon, and decide upon the best course of action moving forward. After all, magic is our forte, not yours.”

“But thank you,” Spencer said, standing to touch his nose against Hotch’s hips, paw holding himself upright. “For what you did, for us and for the lonely dragon… I think even just one person telling him that they were listening made his final song a little kinder. It was worth everything we’ve done for that singular kindness.”

“Are you going to come back?” Hotch asked, thrown. Were they leaving forever?

“Yes,” said Emily. “When we’ve decided what happens next, we will return and tell you. Until then, goodbye, Agent Hotchner. Don’t come looking for us—we will need to concentrate. Dragon affairs take _time_.”

Hotch looked down to his little dragon, hearing JJ sniffle behind him—as well as Rossi. “You too?” he asked.

“Me too,” Spencer said. “Goodbye, Agent. Thank you for listening to me that day in your office. If you hadn’t… well, we wouldn’t even have this hope to cling to.”

And, with that, the dragons left them standing there, nothing but the shack behind them standing there to remind them that magic could be real.

Life went on.


	4. (Bridge)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _~ The dragons deliberate ~_

The dragons did not return for some time.

Five years passed by in a flash. Things changed. Jack grew. The sign on the wall of the sixth-floor bullpen became a curiosity instead of a necessity. The team slowly readjusted to Hotch’s empty shoulder. Their cases slowed down; with the recovery of the lonely dragon, there was a noticeable decrease in the severity and regularity of their worst cases, although that still left them with plenty to do. Eventually, Hotch began to consider cleaning out the hoard of books and ties in the bottom of his closet.

But, he didn’t.

Some part of him still checked the mail every morning hoping for a card requesting an appointment—after lunch, of course, to allow time for digestion.

Some part of him still deeply missed his dragon.

And he didn’t dream at all, not of the dragon or their song or of anything at all, and thought nothing strange of it. Dreaming was something that was vibrant when there, subtle when not, and maybe his brain had had enough of make-believe.

In fact, as would slowly be discovered, no one dreamed of anything anymore. Not a single human dreamed, because not a single dragon sang.

Life felt less.

He travelled only once to the deserts of Nevada, retracing a path he thought he knew to where the sandstone home had stood. He found nothing but rock, sand, and the hot desert sun. No spires towered above, no strange windows glinted to meet him. There was no great heart beating below.

Dismayed, he returned home, hoping that they hadn’t been too late to save their little dragon.

And, finally, he dreamed.


	5. Coda

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _~ The final song ~ Hotch goes looking ~ Finding them ~ A story is told ~ A gift is given ~_

He dreamed of a song without a name, the oldest song there was. He knew this song.

He felt like he’d experienced something very much like it before; in this song was Haley in his arms and a growing spark inside her; in this song was Jack being born and Jack growing and every moment in between.

This was a song of living and of life, and there were three voices already singing it.

_Sing with us_ , Spencer demanded, whirling down around him and landing on his head. _It’s important, Aaron._

And he’d never called him Aaron before, so Hotch knew it was important.

“I don’t know the words?” he offered awkwardly, unsure of how he was supposed to sing a song with no lyrics and no discernible end.

_Such a human thing to say,_ said Emily from somewhere overhead and underfoot and all around him. _Why do dragons fly, Agent Hotchner?_

“Because you have wings,” he said snidely, hearing Spencer laugh. It was a sad laugh, and it changed the song just a little.

_Oops_. Spencer shook his wings out, claws nipping Hotch’s scalp. _Now there’s sadness in it. Help me—balance it out. Put something else in, something wonderful_.

“Like what?” Hotch didn’t know where they were—it was a void, until it wasn’t, him realising there were no surroundings, followed fast by him realising they were by the Wellspring and yet… not. “Where have you guys been? Is the Wellspring fixed?”

But, just by looking at it, he knew that it wasn’t.

_Not yet,_ said Emily, the place they were in changing again. Now, they were in the sandstone home, Emily looming overhead with Spencer still atop her head. _Soon. Put in how you feel about your son._

Love, Hotch thought. He loved his son.

The song changed.

_Now there’s love in it!_ Spencer cheered. _More of that! Your team. Put your team in too. And muffins! Put in muffins!_

“But I didn’t sing?”

_Yes, you did. And you will—keep going_.

He obeyed, not entirely sure what they wanted from him—adding his brave, fantastic team and his favourite flavour of ice cream and how much he enjoyed the moment when he first woke up. He put in his hopes and his dreams and his memories of being a child. And, around him, he could hear Emily and Spencer singing the same. Mixing their lives to make something new. Before it ended, when the song felt full and alive and, Hotch realised with a jolt, singing of how excited it was to be born and to meet all the faces and lives they’d poured into it, other voices joined.

The other dragons, each and every one. One by one, they sang, and then, before they were done, their voices faded. Hotch listened, fascinated but strangely heartbroken by each fading voice.

Until there were three.

The new voice slowed. Not faded, not like the others—it simply slowed and stopped, as though the singer had gradually fallen asleep. Spencer and Emily’s song changed, to another that Hotch knew. It was the song from so long ago—the one Spencer had sung in the box at Archives when he’d so dearly missed his home.

_Now we want to sing alone,_ Spencer said gently, leaping from Hotch’s head to glide around him and tap his nose on Hotch’s. _Come find us when you remember._

“But no dragon sings alone?” Hotch asked, before waking up.

Alone.

 

* * *

 

He went there the very next day off he had, telling no one but work that he was flying out of state. His last experience high in his mind, he wasn’t really expecting to find the sandstone house again, sure that it was gone for good.

He was wrong.

There was no heart beating below. The walk to the strange front door was silent except for the ambient noise of the desert. Heart in his throat and hands sweaty, Hotch refused to veer away from his course, walking right up to that door and knocking twice. Expecting no answer.

He was wrong, again. That was oddly comforting. Hotch was beginning to appreciate being wrong.

With a clickity click of talons on stone, Spencer appeared. Hotch, first, felt a rush of relief and happiness at seeing him that almost put him on the floor, immediately crouching and holding his hands out to his dragon. But Spencer just watched him with his eyes a flat white, his hide so pale as to be translucent.

And no heart beat below.

“Come on,” Spencer said quietly, turning and leading Hotch into the home. Hotch, feeling sick, followed the pale dragon—his hide the same sickly colour that the lonely dragon had been before it had vanished forever.

In the great hall, there was no Emily. Wind whistled overhead. The temperature was hot but nowhere near as overwhelming as it had once been. In fact, the very life of the home seemed to have been leached away—all except for a mound of cushions in the very centre of the room, something strange sitting atop them. Hotch stared at that mound as Spencer flew up there, curling in a sad ball around it with his wings hunched and a thin trickle of smoke curling from his nostrils.

“The Wellspring was too damaged,” Spencer said finally, breaking the silence. “The corruption was out of balance… it kept spreading, even without the lonely dragon’s songs. We just… couldn’t stop it.”

“Oh,” said Hotch, walking and kneeling beside the cushions, looking to Spencer for permission before reaching in to trail his fingers across the hot shell of a jewelled egg, no bigger than a kitten if he were to cup it in his palm. “The other dragons…?” He feared the worst. Knew it was coming. Couldn’t bear to hear it said in Spencer’s musical voice: they were gone. Vanished. Faded away as the magic faded with them, the speckled dragon and his protective mate, the great black dragon, Emily.

Emily…

“We are pure,” said Spencer, the faintest hint of colour trickling into his eyes as he looked right into Hotch’s. “Understand—we are the born of the Wellspring and to the Wellspring, we return when we are ready to die. Our young being forced into it, dragons fading before their time as their magic tried to prevent the hatchlings’ murders… that was destroying it. A corruption of its use. There is nothing more corrupting than a dream left to fester.”

“Can you fix it?”

Hotch was not expecting the answer he received: “Yes.”

“How?” Hotch asked. He already half somehow knew the answer, had known it as soon as he’d walked in here and seen Spencer’s colour. The lonely dragon had been this colour, this strange, terrible hue of nothing. It was the colour of a dragon that sung alone.

“We gave ourselves to it,” said Spencer. Hotch closed his eyes. It hurt. The dragons were gone.

All except one. The very last dragon in the world.

“Can they come back?” It hurt to say because he doubted they could. But, the egg…

“No… I don’t think so. The corruption will fade eventually, but there will be no one to… this is only a little dragon. The last dragon. Perhaps, a cruelty that it demanded birth before the end… but we were hardly given a choice. They sing, and we answer. If we hadn’t done this, if we had let the Wellspring fail, humans would never dream again. They would never hope, they would never _sing_. It’s no life at all to live without hope—not for the humans, nor any of the other creatures who learned their own songs. How quiet would the birds be without it?”

Hotch nodded, cupping his fingers around the egg below his palm. “Will you stay?” he rasped, knowing the answer this too. “It will need raising.”

Spencer looked at him, blue in his eyes, and rose too. Love, and sadness. “It will,” he said cryptically, and then he began to sing. It was a beautiful song; a broken song. Half a song.

Spencer, Hotch realised, was singing a song he only knew his parts to, because Emily had always been here to fill in the gaps. He didn’t know how to sing it alone.

And, when he stopped, Hotch knew.

He couldn’t stay.

“It will need raising,” he said anyway, a little desperate because he’d never planned on saying goodbye to his little dragon.

Spencer bumped his nose against Hotch’s once, just quickly, before butting him again harder and keeping his nose there, a painfully affectionate gesture that tore at Hotch’s heart. “There is no one I trust more than I trust you.”

Hotch stayed there that day for as long as he could, for as long as Spencer could stand to stay with him. But no heart beat below and, Hotch could tell, so long as it didn’t then Spencer’s heart didn’t really beat properly either.

Before the sun had set, he was gone too. The last dragon in the world.

Well, not quite.

 

* * *

 

The dragon arrived exactly one and a half hours after lunch, Hotch thinking wryly that at least it had allowed time for digestion. After all, dragons were above _all_ unfailingly polite, and the child of Spencer and Emily would be no different in that regard.

He received the message from Jack and dashed home with his team hot on his heels, beating them there just in time to race up the stairs and find Jack sitting cross-legged in front of the closet that, so long ago, a dragon had hidden a precious hoard within. And, even today, the closet still held something precious.

Tucked atop the books and ties and various trinkets that Spencer had collected so proudly, was the egg. The dragons’ gift to both him and the human race—they may have given themselves to the Wellspring in order to ensure that dreams would remain in the world, but they’d given this egg to ensure that people remembered _why_.

Today, it was hatching.

Hotch hunkered down next to his son, watching the jewelled shell crack ever so finely, hair-thin lines spreading outward from a pressure point near the top. With each delicate shift of the shell as the baby within fought to get out, Hotch’s ears hummed—a radio going in and out of tune, they could almost hear it singing.

“Spencer would have told us if we needed to help, right?” Jack fretted, reaching out a hand to trace his thumb across the shell. “What if it gets stuck?”

“Spencer wouldn’t have left us with this if he didn’t think we could do it,” Hotch reassured him firmly. And, in time, he was proven right. Without a problem, the baby dragon found its way out and into the fresh air, blinking around with a shred of shell stuck to its tiny muzzle and still goopy from the egg. It sneezed, twice, Hotch catching it as it tried to crawl forward and tumbled out of the nest in a messy tangle of paper-thin wings and delicate limbs.

Then, it looked up at him with eyes that whirled, skin turning the most delicate shade of translucent rose as it opened its mouth and sung. When it was done, they knew several things about this tiny new life:  They knew that it was a she, Hotch’s heart skipping a little with shock as he remembered just how _large_ Emily had grown.

They knew her name was Codetta.

And they knew that she loved them absolutely and completely, from the moment she’d heard them talking to her from outside the egg.

And, just like that, Hotch gained his very own dragon daughter.


	6. Epilogue - Codetta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _~ They’re not gone ~_

This story isn’t quite finished yet. A world without dragons, or even a world with only one dragon, is a very sorry world indeed.

So here is how the dragons returned.

 

It was Jack who looked up the meaning of his new sister’s name, with her sitting draped around his shoulders chewing on a pacifier with the sharp teeth she’d hatched with making short work of it. “Codetta means ‘little tail’,” he read out from the computer page he was browsing. As though pleased with her big brother’s detective skills, the baby dragon around his neck turned gold and curled her tail around his eyes, babbling in soft little trills to herself. “It’s sort of like a coda, which is an ending, but on a smaller scale. It ends a section of a work instead of the work as a whole. She’s an ending?”

Hotch, looking at the tiny creature that was all that remained of the dragon he’d loved dearly, was grieved by this. “She’s an end,” he agreed, picking her up and holding her close, her head tucked against his chest and eyes closed as she listened placidly to his heartbeat, small paws kneading. “The last dragon… just like her father was, before she was born.”

They were wrong.

 

When she was one, she invented a song that—later, when she could speak—she’d title ‘Daddy, look’. It was invariably successful in its goal, since the song was everything she felt about her father all wound up into a song about being excited and new to the world, and it was impossible to ignore that kind of childish glee.

And it was far, far more fun than her ‘Jack is a pain’ song, for sure.

 

When Codetta was two, she learned to talk and never stopped, attacking everything with a relentless series of ‘whys’ and a boundless curiosity that Jack never seemed to grow tired of sating. Since no day-care was qualified to take on a dragon-toddler for whom ‘toddling’ meant ‘dangerously clumsy attempts at flying’ and whose response to naptime was to perch on the roof and make noises much like metal clashing together, Hotch was given permission to bring her to work with him. Very soon, the sign on the wall—which had long been forgotten—became pertinent once more, because no one could really resist feeding her when she turned rose-pink and made sad little bell-chimes at them, and the cleaners were tired of vacuuming up burnt sugar trails.

It became a very common sight to see Hotch walking around with Codetta sitting politely on his shoulder or, when he needed to view things that would be frightening for her or that he didn’t want her being exposed to, spending time with her Auntie Penelope. And she very quickly became an honorary agent, someone giving her a toy badge that she requested a tie to pin to.

They became very used to her being there.

 

When Codetta was five, she was far too big to ride on Hotch’s shoulders anymore and didn’t really understand the concept of this.

“But Daddy, _up_ ,” she begged, sitting on her haunches with her paws in the air and her gold eyes pleading. “I want to come up!”

“Sorry, love,” Hotch said miserably, well aware that—far before any human parent had had to—he’d picked his daughter up for the very last time. There was simply no way that he could comfortably carry the Saint Bernard sized dragonling, even when she resorted to singing her ‘Daddy, look’ song on repeat for eight hours in order to get his attention, each verse getting more and more frantic.

Codetta sulked for three days, only finally coming down from the roof because Jack climbed up there and talked her out of her funk. But she didn’t stop blowing grumpy plumes of smoke for another month, and Hotch was sure she’d never forgive him.

But she did because, three months after that, she started school and after that decided that she was far too old and wise to be cuddled anyway.

 

When Codetta was seven, she fell through the roof. She was fine—the roof was not. Apparently, as Hotch discovered, there were no building contractors in DC who could make a roof ‘dragon safe’. Codetta, who was the sorriest dragon this side of the Potomac, kept apologising and apologising and apologising, following Hotch through the house until, with a squeak, she accidentally got stuck in a doorway.

Hotch walked back and looked at her as she turned yellow from embarrassment.

“Sorry, Daddy,” she mumbled.

And he said, “I think it’s time we moved.”

 

When Codetta was ten, she moved from elementary to secondary school, just as terrifyingly clever as her parents—her father especially—had been. She was an instant hit. Hotch, who’d had a son who was popular in his own far more subtle way, suddenly found himself being pestered for requests for ‘sleepovers’. Having a daughter, he discovered, was far more work than advertised. Of course, by the time she was twelve, she had to sit outside her classrooms with her head propped in the window—various students offering to help rig up shades to protect her from the rain and the wind and the snow—so it was probably fortunate that she was set to graduate by thirteen.

She taught everyone to sing and only accidentally made it rain twice by doing so.

 

When she was thirteen, she came home and asked why she was the only dragon she knew.

And Hotch, who’d never kept her parents’ sacrifice a secret from her, told her. The parts he hadn’t explained before—all of it. Sitting in her room—a barn that he and Morgan had converted into a bedroom for her—and telling her about the dragons, everything he knew, he missed them more than ever.

She was very quiet after that. That was the summer that her colour settled—no longer changing with her emotions, her hide remained a midnight blue, her whirling eyes settling as hazel.

And her songs grew sadder, all without names that she’d tell him.

 

College was sad for them all. She’d chosen a college in Las Vegas who’d reached out to her—one, because it offered the criminal law classes she was really interested in and, two, because the professors were all astoundingly eager to accommodate a student who was now roughly the size of a metro bus. It meant that she was very far away from them, and growing further by the day. Hotch was beginning to suspect that dragons didn’t just mature fast in size; it had been a long time since she’d sung the ‘Daddy, look’ song to get his attention.

When he visited her one semester break, his own retirement looming close, she was quiet and thoughtful the whole time. He woke in the middle of the night in his hotel room to a whispering rendition of the ‘Daddy, look’ song playing in the fading remnants of his dream, only realising that he was dressed and walking outside when he blinked and started paying attention.

She was sitting in the parking lot, tail draped over her arm to avoid crushing a hatchback beside her.

“You have to see what I’ve found,” she said intently. “Dad, come on—quick.”

“Where?” he asked, gut churning as she crouched low. “Codetta, no. What have I told you about letting people ride you? It’s dangerous.”

It had been how Jack had broken his arm when he was nineteen, and he wasn’t shy about reminding her of that.

“It’s _important_ ,” she stressed, her voice clashing.

With a sigh, he slid onto her back, startled by just how _wide_ she was as he grabbed at the nubbly scales on her shoulders. Once she was sure he was settled, she took off, flying low and careful over the streets of Vegas and out into the desert.

 

He wasn’t surprised that she’d found the sandstone home.

He was surprised that the home was still _warm_. It wasn’t dusty or forgotten. Everything there was exactly as it had been the last time Hotch had been here, right to the circle of cushions that had held her egg when he’d found it. She snuffed at those for a while, turning in a tight circle and looking up at her father’s alcoves.

“I dreamed of my parents here,” she told Hotch, whose heart hurt a bit at the reminder. “They were singing for me.”

“I remember,” he said. “I was there. It was beautiful.”

She rolled her eyes at him. “Of course you were there, silly,” she said, nudging his shoulder and almost knocking him into a wall. “I said—I dreamed of my parents here, _all_ of them. You sung for me too, Dad. There’s as much of you in me as there is Emily and Spencer. I’m the child of Emily and Spencer and of every other dragon, and of one very brave and wonderful human.”

With that said, she wandered off to explore, leaving Hotch wondering just how much power was in a song.

 

She found the Wellspring too, but Hotch didn’t know this until far, far later.

And from then on, nothing would stop her succeeding.

 

By the time Codetta was twenty-years-old, she was famous. Everyone knew about the dragon who’d passed the bar and then immediately applied for the FBI Academy. No one really knew how they’d adapt their training to a dragon the size of a house, but adapt they did. She graduated with full honours, her family there to see.

Or, most of them.

And to everyone who asked her—reporters and fans and dragon enthusiasts alike—she told her parents’ story. She told the dragons’ story.

She told them that the reason humans still dreamed was because dragons had made it so.

And she told them never to forget that.

 

And then, one day finally, came the dream.

Hotch woke, except not really, standing beside the Wellspring with his team beside him, and he was as young again as he’d been the first time he’d met the dragon named Spencer. Jack was there beside him—the same age, bizarrely, which was a weird thing to consider, that his son was so grown now. The others seemed sleepy and confused, JJ helping Henry up and Morgan standing side-by-side with Hank. Hotch, looking around, realised why they were there: this was Codetta’s family or, at least, most of them.

They heard a song. It was Codetta singing, but not alone, the Wellspring singing with her. A thousand voices singing with her.

No, Hotch realised. More than that.

He closed his eyes and listened and realised that everyone who believed in the reason they could dream was here with this song.

Belief, after all, was why dragons could fly.

“What’s going on?” Garcia asked Hotch, her eyes huge.

“What are we supposed to be doing?” Jack asked the room at large, although Hotch knew he was asking his sister.

 _Sing_ , was the answer.

So, they did.

 

When Hotch woke in his own bed, he’d swear that he’d dreamed the whole thing, except there was a card on the pillow next to him. He stared at it for a while before picking it up, immediately recognising the handwriting on it.

‘ _An Appointment with A Dragon for After Lunch (allowing time for digestion). Please & Thank You’_

Just to be sure, he flipped it over.

_‘A stamp’_

And he smiled.


End file.
